A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Two-Hundred-And-Twelve

I keep spinning around in circles and getting no place.  I start to work on getting new submissions ready and it seems to just fall apart.  I've been wanting to video me reading some poems from this blog to maybe create some other content, perhaps to build a bit more of an audience, but I keep stalling out on it.  I know that a large part of it is organizational, that executive dysfunction is a real thing, but I also recognize the existence of a certain degree of fear that also causes me to hesitate.  I've been working hard in many ways, but if I am not sending out more work and doing other things in that vein, it is not going to matter, really.  The problem is, though, making that effort often feels like a big risk.  I don't do well with the rejection onslaught, and it often feels like that is the only thing I can expect if I make the effort.  I need to have a real sense that I am doing things that are actually impactful, that are making a real difference.  I need a sense of actual progress and the only thing that sending out work does is provide a chance.  It feels like asking how to invest your money and being told to buy lottery tickets in hopes of winning.  I am not saying anything that is new, and I am certain that most folks reading this will think I am just whining, which is not an unfair thing to think, but I am expressing a real apprehension that has been haunting me for a long time.  I am feeling so stuck and incapable of making any kind of positive change, and that is a larger issue in my life, and I wonder if I might be more resilient were it an issue relegated to my literary endeavors, but it is not, and so much of what is making me feel this way is things that have been done and cannot be changed.  I need to find a way to feel I can make positive changes for myself, and the only area of my life where that even feels as if it could be possible in a real sense is within my career as a writer.  How can I do things to feel I am achieving that?  I need a way to see actual progress occurring, a movement propelling me towards my goals, and not the goals of what I will do, but the results, the outcomes themselves.  It is not that I need to have everything at once, I just need a sense that I am getting there, a way to measure my forward momentum.  I know, you will tell me again that it doesn't exist.  I know that is the only answer that can be given, but it doesn't change the need.  I have no way around that.  The fact that it is impossible is only a reason for me to feel even worse, if I am honest.  God, I hate writing such a downer of an entry, ending it with that sense of gloom, but what else can I say?  I wish I had a way to think of it that made it better, but the very idea of accepting things as they are and being okay with it is kind of sickening to me.  I don't want to get into all that right now, of course, and I am already rambling, besides it is late, later than the bedtime I had hoped for tonight.

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