I just got rejected again.
I should be used to it by now. This one wasn't even a big rejection or a mean-spirited one. A simple "I like this but it's not going to happen" kind of let-down.
Sigh.
What kind of crazy person works, crafts, sweats, cries and then starts all over again with a pile of words in an attempt to form them into a pleasing concoction? Offering the end product, imperfect, but the best conglomeration of the moment, to others who then shred it and give back the pieces? Who is this individual who survives that scenario and repeats it endlessly?
A writer.
Is it any wonder some of us snap, grow goatees and wear all black? Or that most of us spend many days of our lives surrounded by the whoosh of espresso machines and the scent of liquid ecstasy? I think it might be a miracle that any of us press the send, or save button at all, ever.
The mind of a writer forms many thoughts. Let me share a stereotypical morning self-talk of a writer. “Who wrote this crud? Ha. Fool. What idiot doesn’t know a comma from a hyphen? This piece of writing might be valuable to the bird, face down on the bottom of the cage.”
The writer then zips to e-mail or solitaire and drinks several mugs of coffee or tea. Some may even drink Jack Daniels on the sly. Then the urge hits again. No, not the urge brought on by a quart of coffee. The urge to express oneself. The writer alt/tabs back to Word, erasing everything on the page until virgin-white screen stares out at him/her.
“Oh, I feel a metaphor coming on, no, maybe it’s a simile, like the birth of a new morning it brightens the horizon…no, that stinks.”
“Similes are overrated. What do I think I am -- a poet? Ha. Fool. Wonder if Starbucks has any openings, maybe the library, then I can be around books, and with real writers?”
“I’m never writing again.”
The writer returns to the scene of the crime, I’d use the Biblical “as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly,” but it would not help my current mental dialogue.
The following questions were posed twice in different words on two different loops today. “Why do you write? How do you overcome the yuck of writing? And why do you want to overcome it?”
I think the answer is in the above rant, but also in the unique make-up of me. For some reason, I have to write. This blog is almost a year old and I have 169 single-spaced pages of posted material in my Scrambled Dregs Word document. Much of it is lame, but some offered a random person a laugh here, and maybe a tear there.
I hope that what I write creates a spiritual ripple. When I laugh at ten in the morning, I may be nicer to the person in line at the grocery store at four-thirty. If I have to ponder someone’s words or things bigger than me for awhile, I treat people differently than when I focus on what I want.
Finally, I think the God of words expects me to use what He shows me and shares with me. I don’t want people to be dazed, lost and confused when I have access to the answer to their problems.
I write because Jesus is all about words, and healing and love and grace. And I want to be just like Him.
So, I guess I’ll go write something and submit it. They say what doesn’t kill you, makes your stronger. Rejection hasn’t killed any one that I know of.
Rejection – the new strength training.
