Last week I was thinking of giving up this blogging, just walking away, it takes too much time, it gives me too much grief, is it worth it, any of it? Focus on the real world, on life-as-it-is, that’s the only way I will ever find happiness, isn’t it? Learn to be content with what you have, to find comfort in that. As long as you keep wanting more you’ll always be disappointed, always dissatisfied. How many times have people told me that? How many times have I told it to myself? Yet I keep on crying for the moon.
Then yesterday, I thought I would stop because the six months was up, I’d done it, I’d proved I could. Like writing a journal, I proved I could do that, and after a couple of years the futility of it all began to get to me. But I still do it, only this is it. I would still do it whether I blogged it or not, but maybe it could take a different form if I wasn’t always conscious that I would be posting it and other people (maybe) would read it.
The same old advice always comes up from experienced writers (to aspiring writers): ‘Write every day, preferably first thing in the morning before you do anything else, doesn’t matter what you write about, just sit down and write, switch off the inner critic’. But all this daily writing, all these words, haven’t led to anything more constructive, haven’t moved my novel on, haven’t given me any papers or articles that I can get published. Though it has worked for poetry – I get lots of poetry – I guess because poetry comes from emotion and writing like this stirs up some very deep emotions.
I wish I could find some way of making a living from writing, of supporting myself. There I go, wishing again. But my kind of writing isn’t the kind which is saleable, not the kind you can ‘make a living out of’. I guess I could do that sort of writing too, if I put my mind to it, if someone gave me a chance. But why would anyone do that?
I envy the sort of people who go out and make their own chances. Who decide they want to do something and find ways of doing it and then just make it happen. Even if they subsequently get bored with it, even if it drives them crazy, at least they’ve done it, and when it gets too much they find something else and move on and do that.
I wonder how it would be to be twenty again but with an understanding of the possibilities of life, not thinking I had to be a certain way or do certain things. Well, times were different thirty years ago, there weren’t so many choices for young women. Or maybe there were, but they had to work harder for them, they had to recognise that there was a different way, that they didn’t have to do what was expected of them, as long as they had courage and confidence.
And now I’m here, and maybe it would be possible to change life, to live it differently, but it would be so much harder, and how much time do I have left before I become invisible, just a sad old woman? Or maybe I am one already? Where is the courage and confidence I would need in order to find a different life?
So, yesterday I more or less decided to stop blogging. But a complete stranger popped up from nowhere and asked me to carry on. So maybe I will.