Giving Up
Hold on. Would you believe that I mean giving up in the most uplifting of ways; not in the existential dread and deep depression sort? I’ve experienced more of the later; but I too am beginning to come around to the former. It takes the form of optimistic nihilism most days, and blind hope others. It’s there though deep beneath my supremely pessimistic surface. These randoms bouts of “will to live” have been fleeting, but they are getting less so. I have a theory as to why that is, but I think it boils down to just...reading more books?
It started when I cracked open a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic”. I am a sucker for self help style books and this was shelved among some of those. Rather haphazardly now that I think about it, but my favorite bookstore has a rather loose “NONFICTION” section category. Anyway, I hemmed and hawed over whether to get it. Naturally I ended up at the library to give this book a trial run. I didn’t know what to expect and, to be honest, I still haven’t finished it (in true ADHD fashion). What I did read sparked this post though, so I wasn’t about to take time to finish reading and lose that train.
Elizabeth talked at length about fear killing creativity, and boy howdy is that right. It was the way she spoke about living up to the hype of bother internal and external expectations that really resonated with me; especially what she said about Harper Lee. For those of you that don’t know, Harper Lee wrote “To Kill A Mockingbird”. While that book was not particularly my cup of tea, I definitely see now why it was plugged as required reading for middle/high school students. It is a good book. Definitely not teen me’s idea of a good book, but adult me can admit that it was good. I’m far more interested in what happened to the author than I am in her literature.
She just sorta stopped. A pre-TKaM manuscript of hers was found posthumously, but to my knowledge she never really wrote a book again. Gilbert commented that she may have been afraid of the grand expectations that followed her first book’s major success. “What was there for Harper Lee to be afraid of, after all? Possibly just this: That she could not outdo Harper Lee”. That small quote from “Big Magic” hit me like a goddamn meteor and firmly lodged in my skull ever since.
Y’know that phrase, to “rest on ones laurels”? It is a phrase I both hate AND love to use. I am no Harper Lee (shocking I know). What I am is a deeply fearful person. I am afraid I have nothing to say worth saying and, also nothing to write worth writing. I made 25 bucks for a poem once that got published in a small magazine that is no longer in print. That is kind of my only claim to fame, minuscule as it may be. That was also, the only time I’ve ever been paid for my writing. I’m afraid that this is the ONLY time I’ll ever be paid for it. So, I asked myself: is that a valid reason to stop writing? Is that the only reason I started writing? To get a paycheck? The very notion filled me with quite a few different feelings: shame, anger, and sadness. A not fun cocktail of the three swirled around in my guts for an entire day before I triumphantly decided to give up.
My giving up didn’t go through Kubler-Ross five stages of grief model. It went through the Elizabeth Gilbert-esque lens of “what the fuck did I have to lose?” If I decided that I’d lost, I couldn’t lose. In my weird all-or-nothing way of thinking, I could be FREE. That is why I am writing this now, and why I will continue writing. I write because I’ve given up. I am done pretending I don’t like to write. I am done caring whether anyone actually reads what I post. I am done being afraid that I peaked at a $25 submission that I didn’t even like too much.
I give up and I hope you can too.