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Despair
It is half past midnight, thirty minutes into Saturday.
When it became clear that I wasn't going to do any code work this evening with the limited time and energy I had remaining, I decided to work on "The Jaguar's Wife," just to see if I could avoid going a second week with no creative output whatsoever.
I've crossed out a few sentences which I felt were out of character for the narrator. That's it. Then I looked at it and said, "Why bother? When I put it up, people will just say the character is cardboard anyway, that I haven't given them any information, and that if they're just going to read the story for the sex scenes then the exposition is too long." And not even I like the way I planned to end it. To hell with it.
I know twenty-six will probably never get finished at this rate. At one point I thought about finishing them, doing the illustrations I've conceived as a part of the project from the beginning, and trying to sell it. But why bother? Where is the reward? I have always maintained that writing itself, the creation, is the reward. If that is unrewarding then what's left?
I have to admit to myself that Quarter Moon is probably scrap. I have wasted ten years, off and on (mostly off) on that manuscript. I love that manuscript. I cannot make it into something that I am willing or able to sell. At least I don't think I can. I've spent three days frustrating Iain and Patrick and I don't think I can get my brain past the roadblock they've been trying to make me see.
I can save the Aedie novel, but only by basically writing a new novel. I'll do that someday, I know, because I badly want to; but the effort involved deters me every time I start.
Perhaps the wisest thing to do would be to start another novel. But why bother?
I am willing to endure everything else as long as I can write. I have not written more than a few hundred words of fiction in nearly a month. I've been too tired. It is starting to hurt me.
The longer I go without writing, the less faith I have in my writing. The longer I go without enthusiasm, without readers, the less faith I have in my writing. And since my writing is the only thing I permit myself to have faith in - the only part of myself I am willing to say I'm always proud of, in fair weather or foul - without it I am nothing.
I know I've stressed how much this work project is killing me. I apologize for belaboring the point, but it is destroying my life. I have no energy to do anything else. I drag myself into updating mouth organ with three items every couple of days (it should be three items a day at least), so I won't lose readers, and feel guilty about taking the time to do that. I can't work on this project enough, and the longer I work on it, the less I accomplish. I have missed deadline twice. I have people mad at me. It's even keeping me awake at night.
It doesn't seem to come to an end. January was supposed to be the month of code. Then February was. Now it looks like March is. I don't know when it will end, and the number of personal projects placed on hold for this is stacking up rapidly. In CGI work I have a list as long as my arm, some of it favors I've promised other people.
This stress is very unlike me. Normally my attitude to work - for the past ten years or more - has been "If it ain't finished by five-thirty, it'll keep until tomorrow - they don't pay me enough to have an ulcer." I have never worried about other people's timetables before. (I have sometimes worried I was incompetent for whatever job I'm doing.) Here it's different. Here I know I'm competent, I know what to do, but I can't seem to make progress. I have never felt this helpless before.
As you can imagine with my mindset, one of the feelings I hate most on earth - right behind public humiliation - is helplessness.
I realize the intelligent thing to do would be to pace myself, set hours for work and not allow myself to be upset by the task when off-duty. Otherwise I'll go even crazier.
Instead I am taking the opposite tack.
But I'll come to that.
On top of the writing stress and the job stress, today I had my first Really Bad Gender Day in months. (Ardent Readers, who seem to have better radar for my moods than I do sometimes, probably saw this coming. But I didn't.) Last night, very late, I had an attack of I Want To Be A Girl - without provocation, completely unexpected, and it nearly left me in tears.
I hate not being in control of my brain.
This Gender Attack is a symptom of emotional edginess. Of mental unrest. Ardent Readers have seen the other symptoms. Simply put, I have not been a Cheerful Flower lately. And the littlest things are ticking me off unwontedly.
I got a number of emails tonight telling me I was wrong about various things. Normally they wouldn't sting. Tonight they did. It's hard to tell which stung more - the ones where I continue to dispute the charges, or the ones where I get the sickening feeling of recognition that they're right and I really did screw up.
(Remember, the feeling that I've screwed up - that counts as "public humiliation" for my purposes - is my number-one-to-be-avoided sensation.)
And then there's the mail I got from Beth.
Now, let me make this clear: Beth was teasing me and I know it, and I'm not the least bit angry with her, so don't make a fight where there is none, okay?
But she wrote:
Don't worry .... We don't think of you as our transgendered friend! We think of you as our slightly grumpy and always overly analytical friend who makes all those nifty pixies and hates almost everything!
And that made my heart sink into my feet. Even though I knew she was teasing.
Because I don't hate everything. I don't hate anything, really. "Hate" is a word I use only as hyperbole. I have only actually hated one person in my life. Hate takes a lot of work. Usually the best I can muster is about five minutes of annoyance.
I am not a morose person. In the past ten days I have had lovely encounters with Molly and Susan and bc and others, I've discovered the joys of old arcade games in emulation, I've eaten a lot of excellent food, taken some nice walks, written very good code (when the code is flowing well), read some very good smut, had many interesting email conversations, and had my usual amount of romping and fun. Tomorrow I get to go to a show, have a nice dinner with friends, and see Kymm to boot. Life, in general, is still what it has always been: very very good to me.
But you folks reading this medium are getting even less of that than usual.
I didn't want to be pigeonholed as a transgendered person. Then Beth wrote, and I realized that being pigeonholed as a grouch was even worse to me.
Then, after I wrote her "Do I really come off as hating everything?" she replied:
No. You come off as someone who analyzes almost everything and hates some specific things that probably need hating ... and you hate them pretty vehemently, except you seem to feel guilty about that, because you analyze the heck out of your hatred and its sources and whether or not it's a Bad Thing. Frankly, if I were going to sum up your personality in five words or less, I'd probably choose "computer geek" over anything to do with gender.
And now I'm unhappy about being pigeonholed as a computer geek.
Poor Beth can't win.
And I can't be pleased, which is why I quote her - not to embarrass her, but to show how unreasonable I'm being.
The point of all this - yes, there is a point - is not to overanalyze (damn it, I don't like that characterization either), but to illustrate the forces which are currently driving me to an emotion I haven't had since, oh, probably high school (a period of time which, you'll recall, I've tried hard to erase).
I am feeling despair.
Oh, don't worry. I'm not going to kill myself and I'm not going to give up writing. I'm about the least suicide-prone person on the planet - if I die, the fun stops - and I can't give up writing for longer than a few minutes at a time.
I'm not stopping. I'm not going away. But I am taking a pause, from the journal at least.
If I'm lucky, it'll only be a few days. If I'm not lucky, it'll be until this code is no longer causing me pain and anguish. But for now, even though I don't know its duration, it seems like a good idea.
The last period of despair I had has been burned - a rather severe act from someone who values the word as I do, someone who has a huge filing cabinet full of paper trail. I have obliterated about nine-tenths of the writing I did in high school. That, too, I still consider a good idea.
You don't want to read my words while I'm in Despair. Believe me. Even if you never believe me on anything else, believe me on this.
Nor do I especially want to write them.
And now it is an hour and fifteen minutes into Saturday.
It's funny, I always feel like I'm composing these entries at lightning speed. I never notice how long they really take sometimes.
© Columbine
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