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

I received two more rejections tonight, and it is always hard to receive them.  The thing that makes it worse, though, is the feeling that I have nothing else to expect.  I have received them continuously for a long enough time, now, that I do not expect anything else, and am not even certain how it would feel to get an acceptance.  To some extent, I know that a single acceptance, in general, is not a large event, and I do not expect that I will find a major journal is the first to accept any of my poetry, but I would value any acceptance at this point.  At the same time, I am also aware that a single acceptance followed by another period of rejection akin to my current run would not be any type of real progress, at least in terms of a career.  Getting one poem published every few years is not a satisfying trajectory, and I don't have a real reason to believe that one acceptance will change the odds for me, in any direct or immediate fashion.  At the same time, it is the thing I am seeking, right now, as it is the necessary first step, and the feeling that it is beyond my ability to reach it is one that I find difficult to express.  It strikes me very deep with a sense of futility, and it hurts to be stuck in this position.  And then I receive another rejection, and it just reinforces all of that.  I don't know how it is I am supposed to combat that sense, or what I need to be doing.  Positive change seems possible, but it seems I am incapable of creating it.  All I can do is work and work at collecting the ingredients and assembling them, and then I must wait and hope.

I do recognize, of course, that this sounds silly in many ways, and I am aware that it might come across as me speaking of feeling entitled to success, but I think that an aspect of this is more about the sense of having done the work, of having followed a path that I was shown, one that I was told would lead me to success, and then being left to flounder and fail.  As I have mentioned, I am not just someone who writes as a hobby, or who has written for many years in hopes of succeeding, but was guided to study and train to be a writer by my undergraduate mentors.  Now, let me be clear, I am not disparaging people who do not follow such a path, or intending to suggest that only a person who does that is worthy, or even that following such a path should be a guarantee of success.  Rather, I am speaking about the experience of being guided along a path, of choosing to follow a passion because of that support, and then finding yourself in my situation.  The point is about the feeling I have of being misled and cheated.  It is too late for me to go back and change that, and, I do not mean to suggest I don't want to be a writer.  I cannot imagine another path I would care to choose, at this point, but that is the me who took this path.  I have to wonder about what I might have been if those influences had not been there, and I have to wonder, as well, why it is that I am now in this situation, whether it was all just a lot of hot air and I was just a young man that got conned.

At the same time, I still told my work is good, am still being told to keep at it, and that the rejections are not a meaningful reflection of the quality of what I am writing.  That might well be, and I do notice the small compliments I receive in many of the rejections, which are, I am assured, a sincere gesture, but I do not know if that is any better, really?  Is it better to find that the quality of the work is not the reason for my failure?  What is there to do if the answer really is that my work is good enough, it is just that no one wants it at all? 

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