Let me sleep beside you
Saturday, 04.14.2018 - 9:13 pm.

I came home a few hours ago from a walk in the Peak District with some people from the PhD. The walk was organized by the Postgrad Psych Society, and I was a member of the committee last year, just throwing in the casual reminder. Anyway, the walk was fun! Muddy, I'm-sinking-into-the-earth muddy, but fun.

I'd been wanting to go to the Peak District for ages, but obviously I had to wait until the weather improved a little. It was cold, rainy and foggy all week, and precisely today the heavens smiled down on us and we got some sun, but not too much.

Also, the guy I have a mild crush on sat next to me on the bus ride home, or rather I sat next to him, and he took a nap. At least I can now say that he once slept next to me. We had one-on-one time at some point during the walk, and we spoke in Spanish about our national dishes and the shitty political situation of both our countries. I love listening to his accent, and the accent of the other Colombian in the PhD, who is/was also my crush, but we've already established that I'll probably never see her again. 

This week I've been feeling a little miserable. Which is a bullshit thing to say, I know, because these days my life is full of privilege: I have a stable income in the form of a decent scholarship; I enjoy my work and it is a comfortable 9-to-5 weekdays-only gig so I also have leisure time; I have a wonderful marriage and good friends; health's pretty decent in my family; I live in a nice, safe place. The list goes on.

Having established that I'm aware of my privilege, and deeply grateful for it, let me please acknowledge that I feel a little miserable because I want to write. Let's start with non-fiction. I realized yesterday that my comfy living conditions make me unrelatable, and I would find myself in deep trouble if I had to write a piece on many of the issues that I care about. Not that I don't know what's going on, but I don't know that much anymore. I feel I've lost my touch to make a good argument, and living an ocean away from the context I want to talk about makes writing about it even more difficult. 

More than that, though, I don't feel I'm needed. I mean, I know I'm not. There are already people saying what I want to say in a much better way.  Would me repeating stuff change anything? Add any pressure? Pressure to what, or to whom? I've always felt that writing was the way I could pay forward all my privilege, but it's not happening that way. Because I'm incompetent, yes, but mostly because it's best to listen to the people who are in the middle of the chaos. I am not one of those people. 

Then, fiction. We've gone through this. I have been going through this for weeks, maybe months in this diary. I hate seeing everywhere the ideas that make up the story I'm trying to get published but which may not be published in years or just not at all. I'm preparing a submission for a second publishing house, hopefully I can mail it this week. And that's three or four months of waiting for a response. Three or four if I'm lucky, they say they can take more than that, and I believe they will.  

I just feel so inadequate in life (this also relates to other stuff, but I'll stick to the writing today). I have a few ideas for short stories, and I've started putting them on paper, or Word, but I don't make much progress. I feel stuck, I just keep thinking about the manuscript that is going nowhere. I feel unwanted so I'm discouraged to write anything else. Truly, no one cares. My ideas are not interesting. 

The cherry on top is my comic strip. It's been going on for ten years. I'm not going to stop due to lack of attention because I didn't start it to get attention, but every time I post something, I feel heartbroken by the lack of reaction (or by the fact that only my dad reacts to it) as the constant reminder that I don't have an audience. While it's only recently that the comic is becoming more visually appealing, if it didn't pick up then, it won't pick up now.

I suppose I see all the illustrators and cartoonists online, the ones I follow or that pop up on my timeline, and I feel envy. Of their talent, of their having fans of their talent. But I can't make a living out of drawing myself because I can't draw. I don't have fans who would buy stickers. I think my comic strip is pure gold, and there is a larger story happening in it besides the witty weekly zingers, but no one agrees with me. I'm fairly certain that no one understands what they're reading, when they do take the time to read it.

I'm sorry! I've been feeling sorry for myself way too much for a while now. Every night I get a little heartbroken because of all this, and especially on Fridays when a new comic strip is published and no one says anything. It's a constant in my life to feel invisible for one reason or another, and it makes me so desperate because I can't change anything. People are just not interested in my work, and I don't know how to make it more interesting...I'm just being myself. It makes me desperate, being so plain. 

Perhaps I should stop now.   

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