Writing is the one thing that everyone has always told me I’m good at.
That’s why I’m so unsure about giving it up.
I signed up for NaNoWriMo, but here it is November 8 and I haven’t written a thing. I have nothing to say, no stories to tell. I feel as if everything that could be said or told has been done, or will be done, by someone with far more talent than I possess. I am so easily critical of other people’s work, but the truth is, I don’t know if even I meet my standards. Sometimes I do. Sometimes there’s a flash of brilliance in what I write. But I’ve never maintained it throughout a work. I’ve never completed anything worthy of being published, or even really of being shown to others.
This is not humility. This is fact. I have a dozen false starts saved on disc, and I have a handful of completed yet shoddy short stories. That’s it. I’m not one of those brilliant writers who’s written pages and pages of material but refuses to show them out of fear of rejection. I have nothing, really.
I don’t write.
I don’t write…I don’t do anything. I’ve tried to motivate myself, but all this motivation has done is make me feel worse. I don’t know what it is I want out of life, other than to travel, to try new things, to eat, to have fun. When I think of the things I want to do, it seems like they all have a cost, and none of them will benefit me in any way other than enjoyment.
Was I ever excited about the prospect of working, of learning something, of growing as a person? Or have I always been as superficial as I am now, regarding with distaste the activities I feel I should leap towards?