The bear and too many goldilockses

Today I feel like giving up.

 This is not some kind of announcement. It’s just a thing I go through, and I know I’m not alone. So many writers and artmakers do the same, in the lonely, mismatched way we do things. Shrugging at the oncoming wave & being consumed by it in the next moment. 

 The other day, my friend told me she’d submitted her beautiful writing to a journal. She said she’d done it in part because I’ve shared about submitting and being rejected and being published, about being blocked and hating what I’ve created. The same thoughts have prompted people to check on me, bury me in affirmations, explain to me what I can’t possibly have worked out for myself — that it’s all part of the process. Most people ignore it. 

So it was heartening, heartwarming, to get this note from a friend andknow we can feed and help one another like this. To feel a part of something. 

 And I still feel like giving up. I feel like I don’t need another thing in my life that makes me feel lonely and misunderstood. Like I don’t need another thing to be bad at. Like I don’t want more evidence that it’s not about the work, but who I am. Like I don’t need more things to cry about. 

I’m all good there. Fully stocked.

No amount of lovely notes from lovely friends would change this. 

But this isn’t an announcement. It’s just where I’m at. I never know how long I’ll stay. 

There’s so much people say about writing. About discipline and perseverance. The musts. The nevers. And we can make anything feel like failure. We can always find someone we’re letting down. And it’s easier to just let ourselves down, we think. We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?

The hard part of letting myself down is that I don’t go anywhere. You can leave other people — quit your job and move away, apologize and terminate a contract, fade into their background. You can’t ghost yourself. 

I can tell myself I’m giving up, hanging up my fingers. Retiring my keyboard. Putting away all the pens and pages. But the dreams won’t stop coming. My eyes won’t drink less of the light through the trees, the vine wrapped around the dead plant in the garden, swaddling its bones in new leaves and blooming flowers. 

I open a can for the cat and he hops onto the counter once the bowl is licked clean, looking for seconds. We’re not doing that right now, I tell him, and he squawks, he glares, he barrels into my line of sight and knocks everything else out of his way. He waits for me to understand what he needs me to do.