honesty or foolishness or both

Two years ago, I was living with my parents. My car had no air-conditioning, I was draining my savings account to pay back my loans, and I was improbably mostly happy. I had a database of minor league information like you wouldn't believe, sources to call on to find out anything I couldn't see, and I didn't know what I didn't know - I was formless, but boundless, full of energy and vitality and I could write.

I'm now in my own place, with a car whose air conditioning works but suspension keeps creaking, working five days a week and making enough money to buy things from Sephora when I'm sad. I also can't remember half of what I knew about the Rangers' farm system, feel like a failure and a loser, and am constantly on the edge of tears. I'm exhausted and yet can't sleep, spend hours watching television and yet can't write.

So as I delete yet another pitiful plea for someone to pay attention to me when I've done nothing worth attention in a year, I try to say I don't want your pity but I do.

When I wasn't making money, I wanted to. Now that I am, I wish I could go back to that, that there was some way that I could pay rent and write, pay rent and be happy, pay rent and cover baseball the way I want to cover it.

It used to be a day's work (sometimes, a moment's) to churn out a piece on three prospects, and they'd be three guys I knew. Now, I have no idea what Adam Parks throws, why Josh Morgan isn't catching, or whether Jairo Beras has a chance. I might not have had an idea two years ago, but I didn't know that. I was writing by the skin of my teeth, soaking up knowledge like a sponge, so full of promise, and now, two years later, I feel spent.

I want to be your expert, I feel this never ending drive to be the best, to be the only, to be the one you think of when you think of I'm not even sure what, but that's passed me by and that's both good and bad. Good, because there are others and bad because I

I'm not a good person. I've gone on about this here, before, about how I'm all about feminism and equality and more space for women in this fucked up world of sports until it threatens me and then I clam up, because being the only meant it was easy for me to stand out. How awful is that? How absolutely selfish am I?

All this to say that I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Part of this is that I've hit that plateau, that there's only so much you can learn quickly and easily, even if you're me, and that nothing is easy, nothing come free. Part of it is that I only have so much RAM to give, and that right now too much of it is written with stress and the inconsequential nothings from a job that pays my rent but not my soul. Part of it? I'm just not good enough to find a way to write around that gap, to bridge what I can and can't do.

Maybe I'll find it again. Maybe admitting my every weakness is not honesty but foolishness, or both.

I have a stubborn streak a mile wide, inherited from a mother whose never much liked people telling her what to do, either. I'm obstinate and headstrong, both traits that can be valuable but usually just get me labeled a bitch. I'm paralyzingly terrified of failure.

These traits make it difficult to get things done, sometimes.

I'd be lying if I said I was happy with myself recently. I'd be lying if I said I said I was generally happy, recently. So I'm sitting here wondering if I can do what it takes to be not not happy, and whether the sacrifice is worth it.

Funny thing, sacrifice. It can mean so many things to so many different people. For some, it's passing up the easy opportunity for something more difficult and less rewarding. For others, it's passing up the rewarding thing in order to make sure they can make rent. For me, right now, it's giving up, failing, dropping away from something I really enjoy doing, even as it kills me.

It's easy to be objective about a baseball team, it's hard to be objective about yourself. Even as I sit, paralyzed by fear and emotion, accomplishing nothing and being incredibly noisy while doing so, I can't admit to myself that maybe it's the way it should be, because this would be me, giving up.

I've fought so much, taught myself so much, looked for answers and driven miles and gotten migraines. What does it mean if I step back from this, if I step back from doing what I really can't imagine myself without, now, in order to try to grasp at a future?

It wouldn't be a complete letting go, but even opening my hand that little bit and feeling the sand I've fought so hard to hold spill out makes me want to break apart. I have to make a choice, and it feels impossible.

I've stubbornly clung to this for two years, two years longer than anyone thought I would, and I can't let go, even as the tide pulls me away and my fingers bleed from clinging to the sharp iron bars that I thought I could handle. Why give up? Why give in? Isn't this surrender? Isn't this failure?

Isn't this what I was afraid of?