Thoughts and Ramblings.

Dear Reader,

I could have put together a spectacular story for you today. My problem is I have been eyeballs deep in filing old papers. So much other stuff in life gets in the way of the Great Work that sometimes I question if I am focused on the wrong things. It's hard to write when you are getting pulled in a dozen directions at the same time. Hell, it's hard to meditate when you're getting pulled in a dozen directions at the same time. And meditation, technically, is sitting there and doing nothing but paying attention to your breathing (the form I'm specifically thinking of, that is).

Some days, I wonder if all of this is vanity and that I am just spitting into the wind. I have the old backhanded comments of yore come to mind where I was the laughing stock of my peers because I was always scribbling something in my notebooks in school. The polite insults of some of the adults in my life when I was young who thought that their wit would go over my head. (It didn't, and I still haven't forgiven them for it. I may have a petty streak or something because of that.) As I grew older and I was struggling to make even a living as a cashier at a tractor supply store in the middle of nowhere, the comments still happened. They cut deeper because now they included digs at the fact that I was working a part-time minimum wage job with a degree from a fairly well known women's university.

In my twenties, I was convinced that somehow, by some feat of supernatural will, I was going to have a writing career at forty and be teaching English at a local school. Here I am at 39, struggling to write and feeling like a failure today. But that's ok, because everyone has days like this. I'm not the only person out there who is trying and not succeeding yet at making 'real' money off of their writing. I'm not the only person out there whose life took some pretty sharp u-turns and their life plans had to change because of them. And there's the all important bit of wisdom someone dear told me when I was in the middle of dealing with one of those u-turns: Feelings are not Facts.

I may feel like I'm a failure. But I am still writing. I may feel like a failure, but I have a happy and stable marriage. I may feel like a failure but I am raising two wonderful and relatively well behaved boys with my husband. I may feel like a failure, but I have that college degree I use everyday when my kids start asking awkward questions. (We haven't gotten to the talk about reproduction yet, but it is looming in the near future.) I may feel like a failure, but I have written twelve books. 

I just need to remember, even though I feel like a failure because I don't have a big publishing contract and I am not making money yet off of my writing, I am not a failure. Because failure means giving up. Failure means not even making the attempt because someone else told you that you couldn't do it. Failure is letting others define your limits for you.

Like Thomas Edison, I may not have made that light bulb work on the first try, but I have discovered hundreds of other light bulb designs in the process and learned a lot.