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.
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