I have to admit I didn’t meet my goals for the month of March. Didn’t even come close on the writing goal (about 15 hours short – 15!), although I did submit to 9 journals, so that’s almost there. And the truth is, I hit sort of a slump when I pooled together my responses from the graduate schools I applied to for next year. Ultimately, I got in to one school. One. Without being offered a TA. And as much as I try to remind myself that there are numerous factors involved, and it all comes down to personal taste, and this year it’s been highly competitive because of the economy . . . I can’t really get that feeling of failure out of my head. Can’t break the sense that this means something about my skills as writer. I only actually even applied to two creative writing programs, so if you really think about it, it was fifty-fifty as far as my skills as a fiction writer goes, but still, this rejection has really knocked me down, for some reason.
And honestly what happened was, I got my final rejection and I realized that next year I was going to have to get a job and not be a student (my husband got accepted with a TA into the poetry creative writing program at one of the schools I was rejected from so we’ll be going there), and then I just sort of gave up. I got super depressed – didn’t believe in myself anymore – and asked myself, what’s the point? I made the conscious decision I wasn’t even going to try to meet my goal. It was an actual choice – a strange feeling since my goals have always been so important for me. They help life feel more structured in this strange, obsessive compulsive way, and without them I feel lost.
But either way, I stopped writing for a few days and then when I got back to it I didn’t write much in any given day and always with the open awareness that I would not even try to meet my goal. Just didn’t feel like it, couldn’t focus. Every time I told myself I should work on this story or that another voice in my head would say, “Why bother? You’re not any good. And you’ve been doing this long enough – putting enough practice in – that you would be good by now if you were ever going to be.”
But, as you can probably imagine, just throwing in the towel made the depression even worse. For one thing, I need those goals – I have problems with anxiety and whether it’s writing or something else, I need some sort of structured, organized thing to be working on or I begin to feel like I’m drowning in the chaos. But also, not being in the middle of working out a story in my head at any given moment suddenly makes life in general just seem meaningless. I get up in the morning, do my stuff for work (which feels pointless because I’m not sure whether I’ll ever be able to teach for real), do my stuff for school (which seems pointless because school teaches me to be a better writer . . .) – it’s all just empty if I’m not writing.
So I’ve realized that I have to get back into it. If not because I want to be a better writer, then because this is all my life has ever been about – making up stories – and without it I don’t think life would be worth living. What I have to remind myself is that it’s the stories themselves, and the fun of writing and revising them, that led me into this to begin with. Whether or not I’m good enough to get into grad school, then, is irrelevant. I need to keep doing it because, if I stop, what’s the point of my life at all?
My goals for April:
- Write for 60 hours (Average of 2 hours a day)
- Submit to 10 places
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