Sometimes I'm just not in the mood

Yesterday, and even talking to people at the brunch party today, I felt my freelance career was going fairly well - slowly but steadily I've been making progress. But every now and then I'm hit with this sense that I'm not cut out for this business and I'll never make it because it's just too hard. I feel like if I let go of the struggle for one moment the whole thing will fall apart... and sometimes I'm not in the mood to struggle. Sometimes I just want someone to say, "This is your assignment, go do it and we'll pay you."

I think it was the winter issue of Outside Bozeman that set me off. I have an article on Nima Sherpa scheduled for the spring issue, but nothing in this one. I had contacted them about writing something for the winter article a while back, but at the time I really didn't have any ideas of my own, and they had enough queries to not be interested in thinking up something for me, so I ended up with nothing. Now the issue comes out, and its full of writers with good ideas and good articles, as well as interviews with several successful Bozeman-area outdoors writers. And I just felt like all those people are better than me. They're motivated, they work hard, they have good ideas which they pursue.

Of course, I'm like that some of the time. I'm about halfway done with my Everglades article, and I don't even have a place to put it. I kind of think that sometimes we have to come to the breaking point before things start to fall into place. That's how it was for me with the Sonoma Valley Sun, when I first started freelancing for them -- I had been working at Murphy's, just filling in, and there was barely any work at all in the winter. I went to the Sun more or less out of desperation, and that ended up working out so well. I could only wonder why I waited so long.

There is an element of lonliness to this life that's probably the hardest part for anyone... but it may part of why I'm drawn to it. And I don't think I'm that different from other writers in this regard. Human interaction is foreign and exciting and fraught with danger. I'm only comfortable with people I'm most comfortable with -- but even that could be a total stranger. God, it's like I'm from another planet or something. Despite the fear, I crave it. People. I must have met tens of thousands of people, waiting tables in so many restaurants, going up cold to total strangers... And interviewing them's no different. I call them, out of the blue, and go into their homes and ask them questions sometimes their closest friends won't even ask.

And yet, here I am, alone in the basement, convincing myself that it's my calling. Trying to embrace my contradictions, as if within them lies some kind of salvation, or at least a paycheck.