Quantification

It is difficult to say if I am truly a writer.

For five years I have done nothing but edit my first novel and start three more. Half a decade of editing Wages of Sin -- fully a sixth of my life. In that time I have gotten married, I've seen friends die, I've traveled to distant corners of the earth, and I've continued to work at a restaurant and living in relative poverty.

I write. I do. But I don't do enough of the rest of things that come with being a 'writer.' I don't network. I don't publish. I don't... try. I don't try at all. Every day I watch my shows and exercise and paint tiny army men. All maintenance. All distraction. I feel so exhausted all of the time. Is that reason enough not to write?

Five years in. Wages is currently out making the rounds with literary agents. I've received six rejections in half as many weeks. Waiting on four more. It is hard to not feel like a failure when the thing that I have championed as my life's work for five years is met with mediocre critique and form letters. Why write if no one reads any of it?

"A life lived for art is never a life wasted," Macklemore says. Said, I guess. I imagine he doesn't say that too much since he sang it on his 2013 album. An album that I listened to while I was first writing Wages. When my brother was still in college.

Five years. The beast has been ravenous.

I must write more. I must. It is all that keeps me sane, that keeps me believing that I truly am a writer. Every day that I spend two to four hours writing I feel accomplished and prideful, all the way until sunset. Those are quantifiably good days. But I don't do it every day. Should I? Or is that simply another form of distraction? Do I use writing as sublimation for my fear of Time and Death (my two greatest foes), as distraction from it? All I know is that writing feels good. That I--

Shit. I told my therapist I'd write about... something. About something that we talked about last week. What was it? God damn. Sublimation, Distraction, Isolation, Anchoring... I suppose it is immaterial at the moment. At 1:40 AM, in the middle of another night lying alone in bed and just watching the sands of entropy slip through the pinprick hole that joins the two chambers.

So much time has passed. I am hesitant to say,"what do I have to show for it?" because I think I have a lot. Friends and wonderful family (family who I don't spend time with these days).

Gah. There it is. The chain-clad specter that is Shame, crawling on his skeletal fingers across the bedspread and threatening to choke me. I need to sleep. Never was a productive thought birthed of fatigue and shame.

I will write a short story tomorrow.