Hopefully none of you actually use those words on a regular basis. I'm trained to look at my thoughts and actions carefully because I used to be suicidal. If I need to do something in order to justify my existence, it's a trap. If I fail, that means my existence is unjustified and then there's the next layer of defense. If I have no justification for my existence, then I shouldn't exist. Right? Wrong! We all exist and have no need to justify that existence.
What can we use to replace those words? It isn't always easy to know these things so I'll give you my best try. For today, I'm trying to fight the feeling that I'm a total impostor as a writer so I'm embracing that part of my identity. I'm not writing to justify my existence but to try to add something of value to the world. It's my legacy. When I'm dead and gone, I can only hope that someone reads my combined works of fiction, blog posts, the journal entries backed up on my hard drive and my private journal. Then, I have to hope that it adds something important to their lives.
There are days when I feel trapped. I'm unable to produce anything new and I'm tired and I end up hoping the pain will come to help me justify my lack of production. Just in case you feel something similar, let me break down that logic for me. If I'm tired, it's often because I'm trying too hard to create something. The creative juices won't stop flowing even when my body betrays me and demands rest. Being tired is just part of being sick and so I can't need to justify the rest that my body is demanding. Otherwise, I realized that I make myself sicker just to have the excuse to rest.
I don't know if any of this makes sense to you. It certainly makes little logical sense in the course of my life. I have been putting out dozens of pages of new material per relatively healthy day recently. This is a pace I would have probably said was worth getting sick when I was healthier and dumber. In those days, I felt that just making great strides on, or God forbid, finishing projects would justify my existence and let me rest. There's the other problem with that belief. It's like a drug where you need bigger and bigger hits to get the same high/relief. I'm approaching a hundred pages of new material in my "Twice in a Lifetime" project over the course of a couple weeks. I feel ready to purchase and christen a notebook for nothing but notes and an outline for my ongoing fantasy project. That's not true. I feel ready to stop working on the preliminary short stories and go straight for the novel.
This is months of work for me at my normal pace. Why am I feeling like an impostor now? I do not have an agent for my first novel much less the rest of this work. I do not see a path forward toward getting my novel about life and love and learning to ignore the siren song of suicide. It's done according to the current definition of done but I won't feel like a success until it is published for money. My inner critic tells me that anyone can write novels but only the best get published. The fact that I see hundreds of copies of dreck out there does not help deter this belief.
I bled real metaphorical blood along with the far more real sweat and tears for my baby and its less ready siblings. The reality that these early novels might never see the light of day bothers the hell out of me. It's a drag on my current work which I've written for an intentionally broader audience. How can I justify myself by adding something of quality to the world if so few people will ever see it? And we're back to square one.
In my dreams, I'm able to use my non-existent fame and fortune for Chiari awareness. I'm able to tell people that the difference between a success like me and your average failure is that I got a lucky break when I needed one. Right now, I'm feeling the frustration compete with the need to write. I need to finish this project and put a stamp on it somewhere in my mind that says "completed first draft." That's when my coping skills will come into play for real because the distance between "completed first draft" and completed novel is at least as long as the distance between idea jotted down on paper and that completed draft.
Just remember this, fellow Zipperheads and others who live with the pain. Bon Jovi sang it a long time ago. "You live for the fight when it's all that you got!" I continue the struggle so that's my answer when things get bad enough for me to want to justify my existence. With respect to victims of actual violence, I hope it's clear that I'm talking about something else when I strap on my armor and go out there for one more fight. If I should fall today, I'm going to take as many of the bastards as I can with me.
Those bastards are merely the obstacles both external and internal that stand in my way but that's no fun. I'm like the comic who wants to go out there and kill his audience. If I were to be literal, I want "them" to publish my novels and another set of "them" to buy them in massive numbers and, obviously, I need them to be alive. Put on your highest SPF (snark protection factor) gear for this last sentence: I do need them to be alive literally so that they can buy my next book.
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