That post image is way more dramatic than I feel.
Where we left off:
…I had just proved I wasn’t even a good enough writer to find a home for a piece that I had no fucking business writing.
And I was done.
This is SUPER boring. I know. But it’s helping.
So, I turned to humor. Took some classes in satire. Went to a humor conference, and a workshop. Mostly had fun.
I needed a lot of practice to fine tune my work beyond some ribald one-liners and silly hyperbole, if that is the path I wanted to take.
Except I couldn’t stop personalizing rejections.
Now I was selfish and unfunny.
Now I didn’t understand satire.
Now everyone understood satire but me.
Now editors didn’t like me personally. Which is something I might struggle with in friendships, but not professionally.
Now every piece I wrote exposed all of the terrible things about my character that I wasn’t aware of and I wasn’t smart enough to see what my readers and feedbackers just didn’t want to say.
Which is super convenient, because it can’t be disproved without looking like a lunatic or making people ask you why you think so badly of them, which is so not the point. It is not about them.
Can you gaslight yourself?
(And I need to take a time-out to mention that the asshole in my head is repeating “whocareswhocareswhocareswhocares” in the background right now. I had lost her for a few hundred words, but she always finds me. It never stops.)
Which brings us to why I turned off comments.
I can’t hear you right now, friends. Even the most well-intended words of encouragement and friendship. I will read them, be glad, smile….and then believe whatever reason, from pity to passive-aggression, for the comment that reflects the most negatively on me. It’s really gross.
Descending into pathos now. Not where I was going.
Where was I going?
I’m not sure it matters.
And then…the political climate.
Tomorrow, because if I’m going to post this much terrible, I should at least get a weekend off.
