The only reason I’m letting you see this story is because it sucks. I didn’t write it to suck; it is seriously written and intended, but it doesn’t work. Some of the reasons why it doesn’t work I know; others I don’t know. Eventually I will figure most of them out, from thinking about it more or from people telling me.
The reason I’m posting it, against my instincts, is because some of the people who read LSH would benefit from seeing someone they respect try, and fail, to do something that matters. It’s a simple lesson, but one which I myself have had to repeatedly learn, and which I manage to forget over and over.
You’ve read a lot of soul-searching here. I indulged it in the past more than now, not because I do less of it now, but because so often I was wrestling with the same questions, and coming back to them over and over depressed the shit out of me because it implied that nothing was learned, nothing could be changed, and that all the agonizing didn’t matter.
And maybe it doesn’t matter. I believe, to my core, that in some things all that can be done is to acknowledge that they will never be different without some titanic cataclysm that you are unwilling to effect. This is life, and accepting one’s own limitations is called maturity. Unless one does so too readily, and that is called cowardice. Or laziness. Or something else perjorative.
But here’s a slice of triumphalism for you, a bit of truth that sings in the bones: trying matters, and doing something poorly is a thousand times better than doing nothing with the intention of one day doing it perfectly. I swear to you that this is true; I swear to you that if what you long for is to accomplish nothing, to never grow, never experience life, never possess anything worth having, then you should spend your days highly critical of your past efforts, and defer your future efforts to some more perfect day that will never arrive.
That’s a ponderous bunch of bollocks to accompany a link to a rather ineptly executed story, but it’s the truth. And regardless of how inept the story is, its completion brings me to a tie in the post-Clarion story writing contest, and brings me one step closer to where I want to be.
Under these circumstances I will be proudly publicly inept, and urge you to indulge your own ineptitudes when the opportunities arise.