the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down

I find myself strangely loath to blog tonight. I'm so incredibly frustrated with myself and with my writing that I can't even muster up the desire to write some meaningless drivel here; all I want to do is curl up in a ball or pound the floor with my fists, but I'm too well behaved to express messy emotions like that, so instead I will just sit here quietly. I'm staring at the ceiling above my desk and contemplating why the beam there has holes drilled in it every eight inches -- what did somebody hang from the beam? And why am I wasting time considering that when my book is sitting, withering from neglect, and I spend hours procrastinating on the fucking internet because I'm too scared and frustrated by the prospect of writing the next chapter? It would be so much easier if I threw in the towel, killed Madeleine and Ferguson in one last beautiful orgy of blood and death (like a gruesome carriage accident, or a murder/suicide, or a hideous chandelier crash in a crowded ballroom), and got an MBA like I was supposed to.

Except I wasn't supposed to get an MBA -- I was supposed to get a PhD, and now I'm too old, unless I want to finish a humanities PhD when I'm in my late thirties and then spend my forties and fifties scraping by through several part-time assistant lecturer positions until I retire after Social Security runs out of money and have to live off of the store-brand canned tuna that I share with my horde of cats. So I could throw in the towel on the writing and just keep climbing the corporate ladder until I hit a dead end (sooner rather than later, since the surlier I get, the less easy it is for me to wield my charm to get what I want -- and regardless of what my brother may think, I can be charming with just about everyone in the world but him, poor thing). At least then I would have money to feed my horde of cats some high-end designer cat food while I eat take-out sushi instead of canned tuna (like I did tonight).

Instead, I'm sitting at my desk, banging my head against it and wondering why I'm wasting so much time not doing anything that I want to do. I *know* I'm wasting time, think that I know what I want to do, and yet I don't force myself to do it. Not only do I not force myself, I seem to actively sabotage myself and make it worse; I could have at least procrastinated by going to bed two hours ago, but instead I stayed up and made a Netflix queue (even though I don't watch movies), and now I'll only get six hours of sleep before I'm inevitably late again to the big boss's staff meeting.

I can't bang my head against my desk too hard, because the desk is made of glass, and while it's a sturdy, tempered glass, I don't want to tempt fate. The worst thing that could happen would be to accidentally impale myself with glass shards after this post, since everyone would immediately assume that I had done it intentionally, when really it would just be an accident borne of my own rage/stupidity. Instead, I'm going to suck on one of the cream-soda-flavored dum-dum suckers that I have sitting on my desk; it's been there just a bit too long, and so has that slightly softened top layer that probably contains more wrapper slivers than I want to consider. The rest of my desk is like a little explosion of what's been going on in my life over the last month -- my passport, a shower cap, a light-up jelly ring, a whole bunch of euro coins, hand sanitizer, a bell that I bought myself in Japan, pillow mist, the place card from Adit and Priyanka's wedding, some inhalable menthol I procured in Ireland to clear my congestion, more dum-dums, a travel converter, and a pair of scissors. None of that is particularly conducive to writing, but it's better to look at this view than to consider the gigantic pile of clothes in the middle of my bedroom floor (I never leave clothes on the floor, but apparently I'm turning over a new, rotten leaf) or the twenty boxes chilling in my kitchen.

Strangely, after pouring out some of my grim fantasies, I'm feeling better, even if you now feel worse. Perhaps I have transferred all my negative energies into the ether, and I will awaken refreshed, with a gleam in my green eyes and a story springing, fully-formed and Athena-like, from my head. Or perhaps I will awaken angrier than ever, plow through the day with the help of some Black Sabbath, and storm back to my house to once again stare at my manuscript and then shy away from it to seek solace in the interweb.

Doubt is really so insidious, isn't it? And it's so difficult to kill. There is no way to prove your doubts wrong without achieving the things you doubt you can achieve -- and if you don't think you can achieve them, why waste your time? The seed of doubt was planted when I came so close to selling and didn't...it's like I had scaled El Capitan, and just as my fingers grasped the very top, I slipped and fell into the abyss. Poor metaphor, since the only time I have climbed or will ever climb El Capitan was in a Duck Tales computer game that we had on our 386 PC in Ukraine -- but even then, it was devastating to fall at the last second. And while my safety net caught me, and I still have family and friends who believe in me, and an agent who is sticking with me, and a half-completed second manuscript that, on better days, I recognize as pretty good, the thought of climbing all that way again, just to be blown off the side again by fate and capricious editors, is pulling me deeper into the mire of my own doubt.

Or maybe I just need to tell myself to grow up, and I'm learning this lesson harder because I'm learning it at 28, instead of learning it at 12, or 15, or 22. The problem is (and it's not a problem, exactly) that I just am not used to failing at things. Yes, I fail at all feats of physical strength, and my lungs rebel at the merest hint of dust or pollen -- but tasks that require thought and mastery tend to go well for me. And now I'm failing at something that I really, desperately want, that I thought I had the talent for, and it's driving me absolutely up the wall.

And by being driven up the wall, I am being far more open here than I should be -- and without even the benefit of any alcohol to loosen my typing fingers. I just need to reclaim my dreams, recalibrate my expectations (to use a phrase I would use much more often if I had just gotten the damned MBA like a good girl, rather than frittering time away on creative visions), and get on with writing the book and trying again. If I fail again, I don't know what, exactly, I'll do; maybe I'll run off to Mongolia and launch an ill-fated export business to try to turn American consumers on to fermented mares' milk (step 1: create a YouTube video, step 2: have it go viral, step 3: profit). Maybe I'll stay at my current company with the handful of other people who are predicting they'll be "lifers", eating lunch with them every few weeks until we have to start demanding softer foods that don't harm our dentures.

Regardless, I'll keep blogging (lucky you...); getting something out every day, even when it's just this, is good for me, and I just wish that telling stories of characters I made up were as easy as telling stories here about myself. But if it were easy, I would already be rich and famous, and my assistant would be ghostwriting this, and that just would not be as much fun for any of us.

For being loath to blog, I sure managed to waste some more time writing this post; now I'll get less than six hours of sleep tonight. Yay. Goodnight!