A Writer Considers Quitting.

When I was a young and naive, my idea of success as a writer was to live in a cabin in Montana. My writing alone would support me, and I’d have a lovely, literary wife and a couple of kids. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen, everything about writing was informed by the fantasies received from TV and movies, which was the only place I ever encountered someone who had the job “writer.” Between eighteen and twenty-one, I learned that most writers didn’t live anything like that kind of life, unless they were regular bestsellers. Most writers, I learned, had day jobs or a high earning spouse. The day job I ended up wanting after a few years of college creative writing classes and English department receptions for visiting writers, was to teach creative writing at a university.

From twenty-two to thirty, I stumbled toward that goal. I had finished my BA by age twenty four, and I discovered my creative practice involved getting up every morning at five a.m. to write before going to work. When I was twenty-eight, I started graduate school at Naropa University and earned my MFA in Writing and Poetics just before turning thirty. While there, I received an honorable mention in The Atlantic’s Student Writing competition, and I finished the first draft of my novel, The Evolution of Shadows. September 11th happened after I graduated. It made my search for my first teaching job more difficult than it already was. I had my MFA, but I needed both publication and teaching experience, and none of that was easy to come by. Adjunct teaching can become an abusive trap, and even now it is only sustainable for those with a spouse to help support them. I couldn’t find homes for my short fiction, and The Evolution of Shadows wasn’t fully revised. So, I plunged on, working in the corporate world and writing every morning.

From thirty to thirty-five, I worked on revising The Evolution of Shadows and submitting it. I finished another novel called By The Still, Still Water. After getting fired from my day job in Boulder, I returned to Wichita and spent nine months unemployed before finally getting a job at Watermark Books and my first adjunct teaching job with Butler County Community College. It was still my plan to get a full-time teaching job, to continue writing the kind of novels that interested me, and carving out a quiet, but well respected place among my future colleagues. Gone were all the ideas of bestsellerdom, full-time writing, the cabin in Montana. I wanted that teaching job, a few well reviewed books, and to one day marry my then girlfriend, Rebekah, and start a family.

From thirty-five to forty, I got The Evolution of Shadows published with Unbridled Books. By the Still, Still Water got turned down, and, at the time, I took the reasons for its rejection to heart and put the manuscript away. I wrote another novel called The Palace of Winds, and I started working in the corporate world again. When I was about forty, two full-time teaching positions in the English Department opened up at Butler, where I was still an adjunct. I applied, feeling confident I’d land one of the positions, especially after five years of being an adjunct, plus, I had finally published the book. Unfortunately, I wasn’t even invited in for a courtesy interview. I knew then that my chances of getting into academia were over. And, of course, my relationship with my girlfriend was starting to collapse.

From forty to fifty-three, I broke up with my girlfriend of nine years and started trying to date again. I worked myself into a salary at my corporate job, which now pays $80K a year. Also, during this time, I wrote a novel called Far Nineteen, another called The Poisoned Moon, and, most recently, one called Crazy Unconscious Days. The newest novel, Crazy Unconscious Days has not been submitted anywhere. However, between the other four, I’ve racked up a few hundred rejections. My plans and opportunities to teach are long gone and out of reach. I’ve failed to find another long-term relationship, and now I’m at the age where the women who are open to dating me are either uninterested in children or too old to have children. So, although I can still someday find the life partner I’ve hoped for, my chances of having a family of my own are out of reach.

So, now, I look around and see that all the things I’d wanted for myself when I was twenty-four have either failed to materialize, or they sort of happened but sputtered and died. Granted, circumstances over the last twenty-five years have been hard, things didn’t break my way, but the truth is, I’m responsible for my failures.

My biggest problem is that I struggle with a kind of hyper-independence. Unlike most people with hyper-independence, mine is not born from a trauma response to neglectful parents. It’s a first child response, with a bit of approval seeking arising from a lack of parental direction. I suppose you could say my parents “neglected” to provide me with any clear purpose to focus on aside from the vague notion of being “happy.” They never expected me to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a preacher. They just wanted me to do whatever made me happy. Daydreaming, storytelling, and eventually writing fiction made me happy, but no one in Dodge City or Haysville Kansas knew what to do with a would-be teenaged writer or how to encourage such a person. Writing was seen as a hobby to nearly all the people around me, and it didn’t need encouragement or direction—in fact, it needed to be discouraged in some way as unrealistic or fantastical. “Writers” were from New York, not Kansas. In their minds, I had to be gently steered to a practical job. Now, there were other things that made me happy, like playing sports, but even though sport was something people more easily understood in western Kansas, no one seemed to go out of their way to support me or encourage me in that direction because pro-athletes didn’t come from Kansas either. And when sports stars occasionally did come from Kansas, they weren’t scrawny, sensitive boys who preferred to spend time with girls, and to read books.

Although my father was good at participating in my sporting efforts as an assistant coach, or playing catch, most of his advice and direction had a flavor of caution, or what I like to call preparatory disappointment. Instead of wholeheartedly encouraging me, he felt it best to prepare me for potential disappointment and failure in all things—both sports and writing. So, I learned not to share my wishes and desires and daydreams with people. It seemed the only way I could protect my sense of hope and possibility in life and not develop a case of full-blown learned helplessness. I stopped looking for encouragement and help from people because, to me, the specters of disappointment and failure were always looming, always being fought off, and I didn’t need another adult, or my friends, telling me my dreams and desires were hard to obtain and that I should expect them to fail. I already knew they were hard to obtain, but no one thought I knew or understood that, I guess, and so because of their own fear, they felt all they could do was warn me off. So, eventually, I incorrectly learned I had to do it all myself.

Before college there were a few helpers who came along and provided encouragement without a hint of caution for discouragement. Connie Jobe, my sixth grade teacher taught creative writing using worksheets and class contests, which inspired me and gave me the first inkling that I might be good at it. My high school journalism teacher, Becky Maglaughlin, who, after reading a short story of mine in the creative writing club magazine, plucked me out of freshman pre-journalism to be the next columnist for the school newspaper. Then there was my junior year girlfriend, Beverly, who was thoughtful enough to give me a copy of Writer’s Digest magazine for Christmas. I talked my parents into getting me a subscription, and that was how I began learning about the craft and business of being a writer, all without any negative, fearful discouragement. Paying for a Writer’s Digest subscription was the first moment of positive, invested support my parents gave to my writing aspirations that didn’t come with a side dish of warnings, cautions, and uncertainties. Learning about the business must have seemed practical, cautious, I guess, and so it eased a little of their fears that I wouldn’t have a happy life.

In college, I took far more creative writing courses than I probably should have, but K-State kept changing the course numbers for the workshops, so I kept taking the class. The workshop was the first place where I and my writing were taken seriously. I got useful help and guidance directly on my stories. The nature of the writing workshop short circuited my reluctance and fear of asking for help and my fear of getting warnings and reminders that failure was always just around the corner. Now, because I showed up to those workshops already familiar with the gist of how writing instruction worked and what the business of being a writer involved (although still deeply ignorant of a lot of literature), I was still stupidly afraid to ask for help outside of the confines of the workshop. So, I never acquired the kind of mentor that other writers I know have. However, in my undergrad days, I lacked the discipline needed to sharpen my talent and reveal any true potential. It would take two years after graduating to finally discover what my routine needed to be. Then another two years after establishing the practice before I got into Naropa.

My hyper-independence limited me again in grad school. A fear of being seen as a naive, ignorant, foolish, incompetent rube made me reluctant to speak until I was sure I had something useful to say. In my second Summer Writing Program journal, which we had to prune and turn in for a grade, I made a comment about being “the quiet one” and my advisor, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, replied “but when you do speak, people pay attention.” My quietness, along with all the independent self-education I’d done over the years, probably made my instructors feel that I didn’t want, much less need, their help. And, of course, my fear based inability to ask for help meant that I watched friends in graduate school develop friendships with our instructors that lead to more hands on encouragement, recommendations, and invitations to private events and gatherings that, I’m sure, helped my friends get where they wanted to go. I don’t resent my friends for their good fortune. It’s my fault alone, which is, of course, what anyone with a hyper-independent streak would say. And before you call bullshit, it is my responsibility to let my guard down and not someone else’s responsibility to break it down. Go on, argue with me about it.

Hyper-independence, imposter syndrome, fear of embarrassment and humiliation for being ignorant, and a severe response to the stereotype threat of being a mediocre white man, combined with a deep fear of the kind of stupidity based overconfidence that would admit me to the Dunning-Kruger Club (a club I’m more afraid of joining than the club of the dead), have all collaborated to put me here: I feel isolated and completely out of possibilities.

I’ve reached out to writing acquaintances from time to time, but I seem incapable of consistently maintaining contact long enough for a real friendship to develop. So, all my attempts to ask for help feel disingenuous to me in some way, which makes me less likely to ask for help because I don’t want to appear as if I’m simply using people for what they can do for me. What I want is to be included in the great conversation, to feel like a member of a tribe of people who understand what it’s like to do this art and to both give and receive, help, support, and encouragement. It all feels so awkward though.

When the frustration and desperation get too much and something slips out on social media, I get what feels like empty “you can do it” platitudes, or advice geared more for beginners like, “Have you read Writers Digest?” I know the people offering advice and encouragement have good intentions, but to me it feels frustrating on one level and on another level it reminds me how isolated my hyper-independence has made me. If I weren’t so closed off, my acquaintances would know that I’ve been doing the work every morning for twenty-eight years and have only missed between sixty to seventy days total in all that time. They’d know I’ve been submitting my manuscripts and getting rejections. If I weren’t so closed off, my acquaintances would know I regularly read books about being a writer and getting published. My acquaintances would know I’m a member of the Authors Guild, and have occasionally taken advantage of their online seminars, and that I read the Authors Guild Bulletin. They’d know I’ve been an off and on member of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, read their magazine The Writer’s Chronicle, and that I still get monthly email notifications from Higher Education Jobs about new teaching positions that are available. If I weren’t so closed off, my acquaintances would know that I’ve researched starting a small publishing house and that I’ve drafted a full business plan for a non-profit literary center similar to Grub Street or The Loft Literary Center.

But, of course, to start a publishing house, or to start a literary center, requires more than my effort alone. But, because I have never been known to ask for help before, when I ask for help now, no one seems or appears too eager to help because, I assume, they see me as somehow self-sufficient and capable enough to do it all alone.

I’ve done all this to myself. I’ve kept people at arm’s length, operating under the assumption that I’m required to be fully capable of doing it all on my own. Even when I do find a way to ask for help in whatever crippled, diminished fashion I can muster, the help fails to materialize. I don’t blame anyone but myself. The help fails to materialize because I’ve trained everyone around me so thoroughly to believe I don’t need or want help even though help is the one thing I’m most desperate for. So, when I think I’ve asked for help and it doesn’t materialize, my hyper-independent streak gains another support beam that reinforces the stupid notion that I can’t expect help, ever, from anyone.

I don’t know exactly what it will take to break this self-defeating cycle; however, I’m sure it would involve asking someone for help, which of course, I’ve trained everyone to think I don’t need. So, if I’m the only one who can help me break the cycle because even when I ask for help I set myself up to not get it, and if I’ve run out of agents and small publishers to submit to, and all I can do is write the next book, but there’s no one I feel I can ask to read it and give useful advice and assistance, then it seems the only thing left for me to do is quit, to retire from this idea of being a writer.

When I was finishing my last workshop with Steve Heller at K-State, he told me I had one strength: I stubbornly held to whatever vision I had for the story I was writing. If the workshop told me something wasn’t working, my revisions would double down on that aspect as if I were saying “NOW do you see what I’m trying to do?” Heller said that if I ever developed the discipline needed to master the craft, that stubborn faith in my own vision would serve me well. Unfortunately, at the time, neither of us were aware of that hyper-independence streak and that it can only be sustained long enough to maybe eke out one book, and that one book would require a degree of unreproducible luck. Also, the stubborn faith in my own vision can only serve me well if I can find and hold on to allies and champions. Instead, I seem to push everyone away, and I can’t figure out how to stop, even with the help of the therapist I’ve been seeing since before the pandemic.

Talent is great, and maybe I have a tiny amount, but what is really needed is other people. Sadly, I’ve cleared the field of potential allies out of my fear of being seen as naive and ignorant, and an unreasonable amount of self-protection. At fifty-three, those personality traits of mine, and their consequences, might be unrepairable, which could mean it’s time to walk away.

Joseph Campbell once wrote that we must be willing to give up the life we planned so we can have the life that is waiting for us. I never felt like my life was planned. My parents set no expectations for me except that I should be happy. So, I spent my childhood years unknowingly following Campbell’s advice to search for what would make me “happy” and give my life meaning and purpose. Without knowing it, I was trying to follow my bliss right from the start. Where Campbell saw giving up the planned life for our real life as positive encouragement to leave a dead end, soul-crushing job and embrace the seemingly risky thing that might light us up, I’ve come to read it the opposite way. The dark interpretation of Campbell’s adage is that someone can choose to follow their bliss; they can protect the time they needed to learn, practice, and perfect the craft they love, and they can still end up with a life that doesn’t contain any of the things they wanted for themselves, a life that is unhappy, unfulfilling, empty of anything but drudgery.

The life that is waiting for me does not appear to involve being a writer, or a teacher, or participating in the great conversation that is literature. It doesn’t appear to contain a long term committed relationship, or fatherhood. The life that appears to be waiting for me is a life confined to an anonymous cubicle and a home with no one else in it.

I’m tired of fighting the inevitability of my own shortcomings. It feels like it’s time to accept the life that has always been waiting for me is a life that Lewis Mumford warned us about in The Conduct of Life (1951) “We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.”

That feels dark, man. The darkness of it makes it hard to embrace because there’s still a small part of me that wants to fight it. But how much time do I have left? How much time do any of us have left? Is there something within reach that might, possibly, move the needle a little more in my favor instead of deeper into the abyss of the cubicle? I don’t know. I keep looking, even though it feels as if my time is running out.