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The voice that does not
First: I've received all sorts of good advice and sympathy from Ardent Readers, and I appreciate your help. Do not take the meanderings below to mean that I'm ungrateful.
What I am is a nervous wreck.
This is not characteristic for me. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.
This afternoon I was
- hot
- depressed
- sick
- having a bad body image day
- worried
all at the same time. Any one of these alone, maybe any two of these alone, might have been tolerable. All of them were not. I nearly bit Marc's head off, then I went home and nearly bit Nonelvis' head off, then I curled up into a little comatose ball of nerves in the bedroom and tried to sleep some of it off. I felt better when I woke up but it's coming back to the surface now.
I'm ashamed of my behavior. I should have more control than that. I have a terrible temper which I usually manage to keep down to the level of sarcasm and wry retorts. When it escapes, I am repentant afterwards, like an alcoholic who always swears each binge will be his last.
The big problem is the book.
Okay, get this straight. I think the book is good. Believe me - as reluctant as I am to share any of my creative output I feel has major flaws, do you think I'd let people read and critique this if I didn't think it could bear the scrutiny? I think the book is good, and I want to keep thinking that.
But now I find that I am in the position of having to prove myself - to critical eyes, to agents down the road, and so forth, and I have always resented having to prove myself. (This is why, for example, I have always resented standardized college exams and I never talk about how I did on them, and one of the many reasons I am vehemently opposed to IQ testing of all kinds.)
There's a part of my brain that insists "Look, you will never be as tough on me as I am on myself, so if I've already passed my own standards, just take my word for it and stop wasting my time with this pro forma stuff."
Of course, that's irrational and it's not the way things work. I know that. I'm moving the process forward, ignoring that little part of my brain, because I know that. I know better than to listen to the paranoid voices in my head. I just complain about them a lot. I often wish they'd go away.
One of those paranoid voices insists on shooting down anything I do, and it's always there to pounce on me in moments when my guard is down. It says, "Yes, but what if you're wrong? What if you got some readers who were disposed to like it, that they were a fluke, and it really kinda sucks? What about that, eh?"
This is the voice that does not want me to succeed. I hate it. I have hated it for many years. Unfortunately, because I've been sick and unable to distract myself in other ways, that voice has been getting a lot of airtime lately. And it's making me ... tense.
I feel like I'm waiting on a verdict of some kind, but I'm not sure who or what I'm waiting on. I'm not sure who has to give this novel a thumbs-up or thumbs-down before this feeling will go away. But this feeling will give me an ulcer if I let it. It's like being in a doctor's waiting room. For days.
I may have to start a new project just to distract myself from this feeling. What if this feeling doesn't subside until I actually find an agent? That could take forever!
Marc (who, as you may not know, is a brilliant artist in all media - the bastard) and I had a bitter discussion this afternoon (not antagonistic; we were both being bitter in unison) about the problem of having to prove your work to others, having to sell it, when what you really want to do is have someone else do the selling so you can just go create and create and create.
We both agreed (with a mutual sigh) that it's not enough to just lock it in the closet and waste it - so it seems like the selling is a must - but we'd both like to get to the point where the selling is a prearranged item and doesn't demand a lot of our brainpower anymore. Is that selfish? Is it unrealistic? Tell me honestly.
As Eric said, and I already knew: The fun part is over now. Maybe that's what's really bothering me. Maybe I'm having postpartum depression.
© Columbine
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Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we no longer possessed.
- Robert Frost
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