on words, onwards

As we come towards the end of this year, it's a natural time to stop and take stock of everything that's happened in the last block of human-designated time. It's also a time to look forward, perhaps more than we normally do, and attempt to make plans that surely time and providence will throw astray.

Being a writer is part of my identity. It's how I see myself, it's part of the lens through which I view the world. Sometimes, though, things happen that make me wonder if it's time to hang up the old inkwell, stop pretending to myself that I can do this, and take those tentative steps to finding out something else I am - a painful kind of freedom, perhaps.

I'm a baseball writer, or I was - a narrowing of the view, a specific set of talents. I worked hard and studied and drove and spent time I didn't really have to spend throwing myself into this world I wasn't born to, for a good portion of the time relishing my outsider status, using it as the fuel of the engine that drives me to be the best at something - the very best.

There comes a day, though, where you realize you aren't. You aren't the best female writer. You aren't the best female prospect evaluator. You aren't the best, at anything, and you never will be. Hell, you're barely more than mediocre in a lot of ways.

That hurts. It's a realization everyone but the most self-deluded has, but it hurts, particularly in a year when so many other things had gone wrong.

I haven't been able to really write, recently. Yes, there are these blog posts, and these rants, and the 500 words I spout on Twitter daily, but there has been no inspiration in me for big, life-changing works. It's even more difficult around this time of year, because (a) there's no baseball to look to, no commonly available source of even artificial inspiration and (b) I'm a sad jealous soul, who can never be content with what she has.

I finally crawl my way into an online newsletter, and I want to be in an end-of-year list. I have a position where I can write whatever comes into my head, as long as it is tangentially related, and I want to write non-tangentially related things (and I can't think of anything, at all, like my head is a radio tuned to an empty station.) I get a real job, I want a different one. I'm never content - which, sure, drives me to always want more, but is also exhausting.

If I give up writing, like something in my soul is clamoring for me to do - if I give up my position and my voice and crawl back into the hole so many wish I would - that's giving up. That's unacceptable to me, something I couldn't forgive myself for - but there's only so many more nights I can sit crying on my couch because my head is full of fog and I hate myself for claiming to be a writer.

Last year's end-of-year post was full of hope. Hope that I'd find a "real job." Hope that I'd write something incredible in 2015. Hope that things were finally turning around.

I wish I still had that much hope.