Oh Look! It’s Square One!

Wow, this place looks familiar.

This is the place where I started! Hey, it’s Square One! I know this place!

The universe has a funny way of making sure I stay exactly where I’m supposed to—just on the cusp of something big, something good. Just on the cusp of total happiness and fulfillment. Just on the cusp of feeling worthwhile, like all the big talk about me and my so-called talent will be revealed as truth and not just so much smoke blowing up my skirt.

This time, at least, I know it isn’t all about me. My ego has been checked enough to have learned a profound lesson: it is rarely, if ever, about me. I am not the center of the universe, no matter if the payout from the celestial authorities is good or bad.

The work is drying up.

The work I was so very excited about. The work that started to bring some serious money into our coffers. Work that offered exposure I couldn’t get anywhere else. It’s fading away, as day after day I pitch ideas into the ether and hear back only the sounds of my own voice echoing down the electronic hallway.

Yesterday I reached my breaking point and told someone that I deserved to be treated as an adult. I deserved a response, no matter if that response is positive or negative.

I am not, I declared, just a blogger. I am a professional.

Because I’m not a blogger who writes. I am a writer who blogs.

Oh, it looks bald and ballsy up there like that, in black and white, doesn’t it? Does it bother you? Do you question it?

Yeah?

Then FUCK YOU.

I am a sensitive person whose core throbs with the certain knowledge that I am not-good, not-good, not-good at a lot of things. It used to plague me, this idea that I was only half-good, just a hack whose potential was tapped out long ago covering the village board’s decision to go with yellow garbage cans, not green.

I know better now.

I’m not the best housewife, I’m not the best mother, I’m not the best sister/daughter/spouse/baker/ice skater/graphic designer/photographer/driver/chef …

But I am a damn fine writer. I am filled with potential, both realized and dormant. I will write long after these websites are gone, eaten up by time and the recession and the bickering personalities of editors who bar the door for those of us who knock-knock-knock, and ask can we come in?

I will not be labeled and dismissed because I chose this space as my medium. I chose this space because the arbitrary arbiters decide who is in and who is out. I am on my way out, it seems, pitted against resumes I cannot compete with, at least in terms of their serendipity. Say whatever you like about big-time credentials, we writers all know the truth.

It’s all about who you know and how you play, with some magic fairy dust tossed all over the whole thing.

You know what I say to that?

I say FUCK YOU.

I work every day to be better, to use my words to touch you, no matter how humble the subject. I fretted and cried over this latest development this week, and my husband offered me this:

“You’re a trained journalist and you bought into the whole corporate journalism system,” he said. “You always hated the system, for as long as I’ve known you. Is your work on your blog touching people? Is it making a difference to even one person? Then that’s just fine with me.”

You don’t, he said, have to support this family. It is great when you do, but you don’t have to. That’s my job, and I will do that, no matter what I have to do.

You write, he said. If it is in you, it will come.

You know what? It is fucking in me. It is in me.

Game on.

Back to Square One?

Fine with me.

Thanks to Don Mills Diva, for inspiration and sisterhood exactly when I needed it.