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General angst about everything

I'm having a lot of weird little internal doubts and conflicts lately. Some of them I have been able to resolve to my own satisfaction, others I have not. You were all here for my little bout with God's Will, my inattentiveness at church and spiritual preparedness. I'm still not entirely sure what God is doing with me, but I'm trying harder not to be so dense about it now, and pay attention to what I'm doing and how its affecting me and my life.

Also had a little snit over my role as a woman and the fact that women are, like it or not, subordinate to men in Biblical relationships. I had been feeling cranky about this and feeling guilty and worried about my own crankiness because I believe that what the Bible says is true, that women should be subject to men, largely because when they aren't bad things happen. Also, if you're subject to someone else you aren't as responsible, and I'm sure you all know how much I try to avoid responsibility. And obviously, I'm lucky enough in my life that the men I am subject to do not abuse their power and I don't have to put up with any nonsense when it comes to having my own ideas and opinions.  I am required to be prepared to defend said ideas and opinions, but that is reasonable. Anyone who has dinner at my parents house when all three of us Herring girls are at the table knows that "suppressed" is not a word that would normally be used in reference to us. Unless you were talking about compunction or inner monologue or something.

Still, it bothered me that I am, when you come down to it, subordinate to members of the male gender. I do not believe that men have any qualities of intellect or anything else that make them more fit for running the show, and while I don't want to run the show, I was annoyed that there was not any possibility of me ever running the show on Biblical grounds. 

More than this, though, I was a little disturbed at my own feelings. I mean, I am a good Christian girl. I believe in the Bible and the Trinity and creation and Christ's resurrection from the dead. If the Bible says "tough luck, gals, you get to take orders from the gents and that's just the way things are, so get used to it" then I should be able to deal with it without having a little private tantrum over the fact that I had to be on the alter guild instead of an acolyte like my brother when we were kids. I will never be addressed as "Mrs. President". So what? Why do I care?

So I was irritated and worried over the fact that I was irritated. And then, I had a little epiphany, and realized that the subordination of women is not based on any real or perceived inferiority or inequality between them and men. It's a curse. Just like tilling the land and eating by the sweat of the brow and the fact that we ladies must endure quite a bit of pain in order to bring offspring into the world. No one asked me to like it because that would kind of defeat the point of it being a curse, now, wouldn't it? So: it's okay if I don't like it, I just have to deal with it. It doesn't seem like this should have made me feel better about everything, but it did. Go figure.

This little moment of revelation was quickly followed by the question of why I am also bearing the added burden of the man's curse by working a sometimes miserable office job. I quickly came to the conclusion that this is my penance for getting married younger than is, perhaps advisable and for thinking that I am an adult when really I am still a huge teenager (complete with insecurities and issues) who now doesn't have in-house parents to tell her what is good for her. Oh well.

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Here's one I haven't figured out yet: Am I a writer or not? As a follow-up: am I supposed to be a writer or not? I don't really write all that much. I do more writing now that I don't have class and homework to worry about, but really most of it is just puttering and none of it goes anywhere. I am never satisfied with my work anymore. I used to be just thrilled to death with my own writing. Of course, this was very very misplaced (at the time I was writing what I thought would be the next Lord of the Rings, but which turned out, a handful of years later, to be a frighteningly cliché Mary Sue fest drowning in its own backstory with swords and prophecy thrown in to give the characters something to do). And yet, I miss being able to think I am a genius. I miss pounding out a dozen pages of dreck and being convinced that everyone would love it as much as I did. I hate typing out two and a half pages, going back to read what I've written, and being so distressed by the abysmal quality of what I've just written that I can't make myself continue. 

I have two short stories that I've been meaning to submit to some magazine or other for about a year. Every time I go to look at them, I think they are terrible and need to make all kinds of changes that someone else probably wouldn't even notice. They bug me, though. I can't submit something that still bugs me! I mean, other published people do things that bug me all the time. Audrey Niffenegger doesn't use enough carriage returns in her dialogue. Tolkien uses exclamation points in odd spots. C.S. Lewis makes condescending little asides to the reader that are just infuriating. But those things probably don't bother the authors like they bother me, so it's okay for them to do them as long as their work is otherwise good enough to make up for it. I'm not good enough to make up for it, and besides I feel terrible about the idea of publishing something that I would not read all the way through myself. (This is, by the way, why I will not just cave and write soft-core porn-in-space rip-off sci-fi novels to make money).

I am increasingly afraid that the problem is simply that I want to be a writer but I don't want to write. Sort of like how a lot of people want to have read War and Peace but don't want to actually read it. I am in love with the idea of being a writer. I want to have copies of the German and Chinese translations of my work. I want to have my thoughts on children's literature and the themes in my latest book actually solicited. Wouldn't that be cool? No one ever solicits my opinion on anything. I mean, they don't have time, because I've usually started volunteering it before they're finished expressing theirs, but still. I want to do book signings and get fan mail and compose touching dedications to my loved ones for the opening leaf of my new novel. Problem is that writing that novel is going to take time, patience, willpower, and more than likely a lot of hard work. I am not really good at any of those things, and so far I have not been able to make myself better at them. 

I have a lot of really good ideas. I will, in complete modesty, allow myself that much. I have several ideas for stories that I think would make fabulous reading in the hands of a good author. The problem is that I am not a good author and I seem incapable of doing the things necessary to become one. 

I decided not too long ago that I was going to start working on one story and stick to it. I wasn't going to play with my other stories until it was done. I was going to write every Tuesday night and every Saturday afternoon (barring special occasions) and I was actually going to make headway. I chose Cammy's story because it would involve the least amount of research and was closest to home for me. So I started writing the first chapter. I really felt like I might be making some kind of progress for a while. I made an outline, for crying out loud! Doesn't that mean that you're actually going to do something when you have an outline? Granted my outline stops shy of the end of the story, but I figured that might be a good thing because that meant I could find out what the end was when I got there. 

I think Shirley Jackson tried to write a mystery novel this way once. She wrote all her main characters down on slips of paper, and pulled one out of a hat at the end to decide who was the murderer. Then she went downstairs to show her parents, who were disinterestedly supportive. I believe the result was that Miss Jackson decided, at twelve, never to write anything, ever again. Obviously she did not stick to this resolution in her adult life, but that's how we writers are. We have to periodically decide that we are really complete hacks with no hope of success. We then plunge ourselves into the depths of despair, weep for the cruelty of fate and end up with our loved ones trying to coax us off the roof with Thin-mints and Harry Potter fanfiction. Not that this has ever happened to me, personally. *cough* 

So anyway...where was I? Outlines, I think. Right. So I started writing Cammy's story and really felt like I was going somewhere with it, but a few days ago I picked up my notebook and thought "Every scene I've written so far has been a big dialogue composed of nothing but in-jokes and things I wish I would have said when the opportunity arose or a ponderous, didactic monologue expressing my world-view worthy of Ayn Rand. Bah! No one's going to read this unless they know me well enough to either get the jokes or feel guilty about not buying it!"

Hence the current state of doubt and anxiety that you see before you.

So I'm wondering: Does my inability to actually do anything about my writing mean that I'm not supposed to be a writer? Or does it just mean that I need to kick myself in the behind and get moving? I feel like I've been given some level of gift for writing, and I also feel that this means I am intended to use that gift and become a writer. On the other hand, I also had an incredible singing voice when I was a teenager and at one time thought that this meant I should play Eponine in Les Miserables. Given that two different bouts of pretty severe bronchitis have diminished my singing ability and considering the fact that I can no more read music than I can play the bassoon, I think this conviction may have been a tad misguided. Who's to say that my long-held conviction that I was meant to be a writer isn't so much wishful thinking?

Here is a happier thought: I may just not be a writer yet. Maybe I just need more hours in a classroom being told not to use exclamation points to denote volume. Maybe I just need to read more useful stuff that is not complete escapist fluff. I suspect part of the reason that I don't know the ending to Cammy's story is this: the story is glorified, fictionalized autobiography. It is the story of me with extra snark thrown in for flavor, and cut down for brevity and succinctness. Maybe I don't know the end of the story because obviously I haven't reached the end of mine. Not that I intend to tell Cammy's entire life story from birth to death, but a lot of the issues that I think make the story worth writing (dealing with long-distance friendships, growing up, learning how to be married, friends who betray or disappoint you) are all issues that I have not yet resolved for myself. Oh my gosh, I'm like an aquaphobe trying to write a book on swimming. I might as well be a failure trying to write a self-help book! That's what I'm doing! I'm trying to write a book about a girl who somehow deals with these problems and resolves them to her own satisfaction, and I haven't resolved them to my own satisfaction! It all makes sense...I am going to go away and think for a while now...

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Yes, I am having an angst fest, and I really should just get over it and go write something, be it garbage or solid-gold brilliance. Or at the very least get up off the computer chair and vacuum. Anyway, I need to think a little, so this is it for now.