A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Forty-Six

I feel very scared about my career prospects right now.  I am approaching my hundredth straight rejection.  I had one piece accepted by a local journal in 2019, but that was before I had begun my real push.  Since then, it has been relentless and unchanging, and I am afraid to have this continue.  It is too late for me to pursue something else in the way I have poetry, and even more, writing is the only thing I have a real desire to do on this level, indeed, a great deal of my identity is built upon the belief in my self-conception as a writer.  It is not only that I have felt a love for writing since quite early in my childhood, it is also that I was guided and encouraged by many of the most influential people in my life since I was young.  If there was a point when I might have considered another path, it was at the precise time when I was being pushed by knowledgeable mentors I respected and trusted to pursue this profession.  And now, I fear that it was all leading to this place of failure, and that it will not change.  I know that it is possible for all this to change at any nomenclature, but I feel as if it will only continue on this way.  I do not know what I can do to change things.  I keep working and attempting to improve my poetry, but I have a lot of doubt that I will ever get it in front of readers in a meaningful way.  It scares me that I have wasted any chance I had, either because I did not get enough work done when I was younger, or because I would always have wound up in this circumstance.  What if it never changes, I find myself thinking, and years from now it is a thousand rejections?  I do not understand it now, do not know how it can be that I am told, even now, by poets I admire and respect, that I am doing good work, and yet, those same poems are being rejected by every editor who sees them?  I am sick of this feeling, but I fear it will never go away, that I will always be in this situation.  Most of all, I am afraid it may be what I deserve, even if I will never understand the reasons.

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