A Writer's Notebook, Day Six-Hundred-And-Ninety-Three

If I am to be honest here, and why not, I need to acknowledge that I am still feeling rather down about my current difficulties getting work published.  I have discussed this many times, and I don't really want to get into it again.  I am trying to figure out a way to feel that I am making real progress in terms of my career goals.  Relying upon writing more and more until I burn out is just a recipe for disaster, and I am glad to have decided to regulate that tendency before I exploded altogether.  Though I am taking it a bit lighter at the moment, I am continuing to work on multiple pieces, between that long poem, the fiction I am writing, and other poems that I am writing as well.  I am doing less work, and I do feel a bit of guilt about that, but I also know it was needed. 

At the same time, it leaves me without a coping mechanism, one that I admit did not do a great job in the end.  I am too aware of the difference between writing and getting work published, and am focused upon those professional questions at the moment.  I can believe in my work, and I can have others who encourage me, but in the end, I want to know it is publishable, or that I am moving in that direction at the least.  That is not something that I can know is true just because I am told it by someone.  It is a thing that is only proven by the outcome: a piece can only be called publishable if it is selected for publication.  This, of course, leaves me in the same place I have been, and does not offer me any way to interpret my current experience that changes it.

I would not focus on this if I were not also aware that it carries over into my mood in general.  It has been a rough period for everyone, and Melissa and I have been through our share.  My being anxious and upset over my difficulties getting work published is not beneficial, and the fact that reaching out for help seems fruitless only adds more frustration.  It feels like a trap.  I'm sure I have said it before, but it does not help to receive advice which consists of doing the things already being done.  I am already writing and sending out work, am attempting to involve myself in the community (though that is not so easy at the moment).  The only advice I have received besides this was from a friend who just suggested I run off and get a job at a magazine, which I have done before and is not anything I want to do again to begin with, and is not a thing I could just do, even if I wanted to, and all that would be true even if periodicals were not a troubled industry.  But, at least he was attempting to help, though, the truth is, I am focused on my creative work, and I am not interested in going in another direction.  I want to figure out a way to feel I am progressing in my career, and not just in terms of the work I have accumulating.  It is the same as a personal diary if it is not presented, if it exists solely as a thing I have written and not as a piece that is read by others.  I mean, in this regard, that the work is not complete for me until it is out of my hands. 

Of course, I am getting back to old issues, and the real question needs to be what I can do to get beyond feeling this way, when my feelings are a real response to my situation and I do not have control over the creation of a positive outcome.  It feels to me that the only two choices I have are to continue as I am or quit altogether.  This latter is not anything I am considering, as I do not want to know the version of me that has accepted that type of failure.  So, that leaves continuing along, but I am not certain how to do so in a way that does not keep me trapped here.  Even the fact that so much of what I am writing in this entry repeats ideas I've said so much before is a symptom of what I am speaking about, and I can see it, but I do not know what to do.  I cannot see how I am supposed to change how I feel about this without some form of positive feedback to help me see I am not just wasting time.  At the moment, I'm feeling very dejected, and that has me in a negative place and I need to move out of that space.  It may be that even this is a step in that direction, but it still feels as if I need something external, and I know that makes it impossible for me to solve the problem.

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