Friday, Feb. 07, 2020 - 11:38 pm.
I guess it'll be best if I don't stay long in here because all I have in me right now is whining. Well...no, I mean, things have been great, it's just that my ego is sore at the moment and it hurts, and it's like there's a big, black cloud covering it. But before I get all melodramatic, the good stuff.
We're still on vacation, Andrew and I. Temperatures are slowly decreasing, so mornings are turning a bit chilly, sometimes foggy. It's nice waking up next to Andrew, who tends to be very warm. It's also nice to not have to rush to get out of the bed. Once we do get out of bed (no later than 9 am, though!), we have breakfast with nice coffee that I brought from my home country.
And we got paid today! Andrew twisted his ankle last week, so today was his first day out of the house for days and we had to make something special. We went out for breakfast (yes, we love having breakfast) and to buy stuff for the house at one of the many Chinese malls that have popped up in the city over the years.
We're also going out tomorrow. We have this routine every once in a while, in which we walk to take stuff to a recycling center, then we go into the Home and Construction store which houses that recycling center to look around or shop, and then we walk back home, stopping by a small farmers' market (it has two stalls). They sell fruits and veggies, and cheese from the countryside. It's ridiculous how much joy I derive from buying fresh fruits and veggies, but they indeed taste so much better than those bought in the supermarket.
And there are more plans like this in the horizon for the remainder of our holiday. We're also going to our vet friend's, uh, land next weekend. Seriously, it's a lot of land. It includes manors, farm animals, wild horses, mountains, mountain lions(!), and part of a lake(!). It's cool, and I will not get into class-struggle-related musings about this.
Counting my blessings distracted me from my hurt ego, but let's circle back to that. What happened is what always happens: I wrote an article. It was published in that renowned digital newspaper, and the article was well-researched, well thought-out, well written.
And it went very much unnoticed.
It's stupid, but it hurts. I try to keep things in perspective, though.
First, I understand the context: there's big turmoil over the president's current tantrums (which includes threatening with a coup?), so people are talking about something else.
Second, my article is just an analysis of the psychosocial fabric of the country and it explains how we got to where we are now* (coup included), and hey, who wants to read about that?
*Well, not me, not physically. I fucked right off.
Third: it's me. My impression of my own online existence is that people see my name and/or my face and actively avoid me. I have no proof of this, but also no doubt. Yeah, ok, I'm exaggerating. But for whatever reason, I'm not a, say, clickable person.
I'm angry. It's a damn good article. It's stuff that people should be aware of. It's nicely written, beautifully even. But I'm just uninteresting and/or invisible, so all that effort was a waste of time. People don't engage with me the way they engage with the other people that write for that newspaper. On the plus side, as I always say, I don't have to deal with trolls nor make any social effort to reply to anything.
Nevertheless. If there's something that fucks with my head is being invisible. And that's the story of my life, being so. I'm not worthy of attention. My ideas are not worthy of attention, my writing is not worthy of attention. Even if I wrote a good article. A damn good article.
This also reminds me that I'm waiting for word from a publishing house on my manuscript. They could still take months to reply, but what I'm getting at is that they'll probably reject it, because of course they will, so I should start looking for other options. What I'm also getting at is that it'd be bullshit if they rejected my manuscript, because it's good now. I wrote a doctoral thesis on fiction, I received humilliating feedback on my drafts. It *should* be good now.
I could go on, but what's the use. Suffice to say that I'm angry, frustrated, hurt. Everytime I publish something I feel worthless, invisible, unheard. The page visit count is pathetically low, the faves and RTs single-digit.
And yet I'm already thinking about the next article I want to write.