What is success?
In baseball, success is both easy and incredibly difficult to define. Success is a certain number of home runs, a certain batting average, a certain way of creating outs. It's both one thing (winning) and every thing.
In life, it's much harder than that to define success. I used to think I'd found some measure of success - first writing locally, then getting to write at Baseball Prospectus, and then...and then...but the problem with "and then" is that there's the question of "what's next?"
I've been stuck on "what's next" for over two months now, since I was laid off from my rent-paying job precipitously and have had to make do with a set of circumstances I've handled both well and not well enough. I'm in that precarious position where I can make do for right now, but I can't make do forever, meaning I've had to turn away from opportunities I never thought I'd even be able to think about. My whole life is in limbo right now, which feels like the opposite of success.
In some ways, I've failed. Without getting into specifics, I'm not brave enough to make what I want happen, and I'm not good enough to get other options presented to me. I spend too much of my time sitting on my couch, staring at the TV and/or crying, alternately. I'm too uncertain to network properly, and I'm too plainspoken to not put this stuff on the internet, when my current situation should probably call for care and quiet.
I write, but I'm not a successful writer. I'm no one's favorite, and I don't have a big enough name to argue back. I'm too established to be up-and-coming, but I'm too unknown to be established.
This was going to be a...whatever I write on this blog is - about Pitch and being a woman in baseball. About success in failure and how incredible (and how easy it is to be cynical about) a story where a woman is the main character, a sports story where a woman is the one we're supposed to care about, a sports story where she's not the sidelined chick with three lines. Maybe I'll still write that, but right now, I feel like the sidelined one.
Even now, at a point where it's better for women writing sports than any other point in history, it feels like we still fall prey to the curse of "there can be only one." Some of this is internal, yes. When you're trained throughout your entire life to treat every day like a battle for superiority of some kind between you and your fellow women, it's real easy to bring that into your writing. Some of it is external, though, the self-same notion that women can't be good at this.
Of course, there's always the what if - what if the reason I'm stuck on "what's next" is because I really am not good at this? I can't even write a coherent and clear ramble on Twitter about failure and success without twisting it into a rant about how fair life isn't, so maybe this isn't the thing for me.
Here's the thing, though: It's really difficult to not focus on that when "what's next" seems to be flashing in front of your eyes in neon letters. It's hard not to push the words out of your hands because you have to, not because you want to. It's impossible to slow down and let things come to you because you have to keep reaching and keep grabbing and losing and trying to get to that mythical whatever is next.
