I finished yesterday’s post with a rhetorical question – which I intended to continue today – I remember that, but I can’t remember what it was. Excuse me while I have a quick check…
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‘Why not just let it all go, accept that I am who I am, not cut out to be A Writer. After all, I’ve given up on so many ideas about how my life should have been (happy relationship, career, financial independence etc), why do I keep picking away at this one?’
Ah right, yes, that is what I was going to write about. It’s been in my head quite a lot and I thought I had an answer…
The main one, I think, is that that is the only one of the four which is still within my control. I could argue over whether any of them are realistically feasible, but I’m not going there today, beyond saying that all of them rely on huge amounts of luck, but also, more significantly, on other people – potential lovers, potential employers, potential clients. One thing I have learnt to accept in life is that any situation where I have to persuade or convince anyone else is stressful, unlikely to end well for me and hence best avoided.
But I can write. I can even ‘publish’ – even if it’s only posting these daily 500 word mini-essays about this, that and nothing in particular, it’s still publication in the sense of putting it into a public space where anyone with access to the internet can potentially read it. I can even go further, I can gather my words together and dump them into e-books, or have them printed into paperbacks which I can put on my shelves with my name on the spines. The technologies and processes are all at my fingertips.
A couple of years ago I met a life coach who suggested I visualise writing a best-seller, then plan the steps to get there. I don’t really know why I reacted the way I did, but I got very angry – she was trying to help me, but setting extremely unrealistic aspirations just seems frustrating and depressing, not motivating, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose it’s the tired old chestnut about the glass of water again – the significance of the gap seems overwhelming compared to that of the contents.
What I really long for is that buzz of excitement from creating a world in my head, finding out what’s going to happen next, bringing it all together. There really is nothing in the world quite like it – except the buzz of intellectual discovery, the moment when the ideas interconnect and click together and suddenly some small part of the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before – I’ve felt that too, but not for many years.
So, all I can do is to keep going, doing what I can, not being distracted by what I can’t. Letting go of expectations, and letting the words take control.