My Semi-Annual Blog Post

Yesterday my shrink mentioned that I appeared to be struggling with a lack of hope these days. I see him via a HIPAA-compliant internet portal, and in the upper right hand corner of my screen when we talk is an image of myself, peering into the camera. I usually try to avoid looking at this, because it makes me self-conscious and its split-second delay has a slightly nauseous effect on me, but I glanced up at it then. I was sitting in semi-darkness, my face shrouded in a digital shadow that left me looking pale and puffy. It was as though, without intending to, I’d managed to mimic my state of mind with my webcam.

He’s right. Hope has been thin on the ground for me lately — thinner, even, than it was during the long, dreary years when I was writing the book that nobody will ever read. I was doing better for a while, then worse, then better, then worse. For a long time, I neglected the basic chores of living, and it’s started to seem like all of that is catching up with me this winter. My physical health isn’t so hot, my sobriety has wavered a few times, my finances are in an uproar because I basically ignored them for four years, and I find myself facing a future that I don’t understand: I don’t think I have the heart to write another book, and I certainly don’t have the financial wherewithal to sit on my ass while I do it, so it’s starting to seem like I’m abandoning a lifelong dream, one I spent years getting thisclose to, in order to compromise and settle down to a life as yet another prosperous legal drone with no meaning.

I know that’s not true — I didn’t pick the law out of thin air because it would be a way to get rich again; I don’t have any particular interest in practicing the kind of law that makes you rich, anyway. But because I have no clue what my life looks like if I’m not always striving, if not for literary fame, then at least for literary respectability, it appears in my mind’s eye as a void. That, combined with the fact that if I don’t maintain my sobriety there’s no way I’m going to make it through law school, leaves me reeling a little bit.

This is the first thing I’ve written in a long time. For a while I was sort of soldiering on, telling myself I was going to finish another manuscript before I left town, but time keeps slipping by and I still can’t druge of the motivation. What’s the fucking point, I wonder, if I’m just going to fling it down another black hole. And there you have it — I already have flung it down a black hole. I have a lot of regrets about my life. For years I used alcohol to keep from thinking about them, but now that I’m mostly sober that’s not really an option anymore. They wash up in my mind: why didn’t I realize when I was 24 that life wasn’t going to just happen to me if I didn’t do something to make it happen? Why did I leave New York if I’d already written the story that would be (what I thought was) my big break, and had already begun to write the novel that has come to be such a source of pain and frustration now? Why, if I was going to be half-assed about my freelancing career, didn’t I just get a job at a bookstore or a coffee shop when I came back to Portland? Why had I mistreated the women who were good for me and got hooked on the ones who were bad?

You know, it’s not that shocking that I didn’t become a famous writer; there are hundreds upon hundreds of very good writers who, for reasons of luck, or temperament, or distraction, or whatever, never made it. I suspect my problem is temperament; I lacked drive and often spend months on end wallowing in the fact that I wasn’t writing, rather than pushing hard to make my work the very best it could be. I’ve never been the kind of artist who wanted to be surrounded by art and artists all the time; I’ve got little use for most criticism and don’t care to write it, I tend to find other writers precious and tiresome, especially when we’re all together at once; I read a lot — or I used to, I seem to have forgotten how to do it in the last few months — but I’m not the relentless bookworm that a lot of writers, including those I most admire, seem to be. I wander astray, get distracted by politics and current events. I harbor resentments toward the fanatacism and mediocrity of the American humanities that make it impossible for me to work in an academic setting. In the end, I wonder if maybe I wasn’t supposed to do this at all.

But what is discouraging is that there were other goals I had, very normal, everyday goals, that I never got anywhere near, either: a family, a job at which I could be good, a sense of having done something with myself. Those were all things I wanted when I was younger, and to this day they seem strange to me, a part of life that other people are somehow able to do and I’m not, as though there’s some kind of magic underlying the world that nobody told me about, and now it’s too late. I’m keenly aware that starting over again at 38, especially when progress is so precarious, is risky, and that I’m operating on a limited timeline. And yet I don’t feel any more equal to these tasks than I did at 28, or 18, or 8. I sometimes I think I’ve learned nothing but a well-earned sense that life will kick you around and leave you with scars that never go away.

Many days, it’s not as dreary as all that, though I’m still struggling with motivation in a way that I’m finding increasingly frustrating and confusing. Even if I’m able to maintain a realistic perspective on things — that, for instance, there are plenty of lawyers who are writers, and plenty of people who have families in their 40s and even 50s, and the law may in fact be more suited to my particular than the arts anyway — I’m still struggling with basic life maintenance, little things I know I can and should do to keep myself feeling better, more confident, and sober. Exercise. Work. Meetings. All things I can do, and have done. But every morning I wake up and the room is empty and the day stretches out before me and by the time I’ve taken the dog to the park and gotten all the animals fed and so forth, the day is half over and I’m out of energy for things like job-hunting or writing or running. Soon enough it’s dark and another day that I’ve spent alone, not moving forward, not doing anything to make myself feel better, has gone by.

You know I don’t know if I’m feeling this way right now because of some external cause or because I missed a couple of days of my somewhat neolithic psychiatric medication, a pill that makes my stomach hurt and sometimes gives me the sweats but at least keeps my spirits relatively bright. In theory missing it for a couple of days shouldn’t lead to this kind of anxiety spiral. I took it again this afternoon, and I did manage to get some things done today, though by 3 PM I once again found myself lying in bed wondering what the hell the point of anything was. I’m writing this more or less so I can feel like I did something, anything today, even if it’s just bleat about my first world problems on my mostly-defunct blog.

At least I managed to fill the last 30 minutes or so. So that’s nice.