Will you be my Lucy?

I recently went to a very interesting breakfast with local bloggers (if you read French, check out these super cool fahion chicks: Audrée and Julia -who sells her jewelery at Anthropologie!- and this dude (Patrick) too!), in relation to a little something that has been stirring around these parts (I will soon come back to it, promise). I was obviously the imposter in the group, among these people who have PR and who matter and are involved in great projects and have big readerships and such. I was sitting next to Claudia, this beautiful, warm, articulate, smart, semi-famous woman who's writing books and articles in real papers and is sometimes seen/heard on TV/radio, and she impressed me probably more than all of the others...

And after all I was thinking was, why didn't I follow this path, too? Montreal's milieu is relatively small, and it's not so hard to make your mark... I had everything going for me: I studied in the right place (same program, same university as her), and mingled with the right people who had the connections and the means (among other things, I was friends with her, who got her memoir/master's thesis published and instantly became a cultural landmark (the book even became a successful  movie). There was also her, who was a good friend of Claudia by the way (she presented a very touching hommage at her funeral)). Without thinking that I am the-most-fantastic-writer-there-ever-was, I still  believe that I have some talent, clearly not a genius-level one but still a little bit of one that maybe could have taken me somewhere other than a prefab desk... My personality and presentation aren't so bad, and sometimes, I even have things to say (a minority of which I think is turning out to be somewhat relevant).

It isn't about jealousy or envy (I'm pretty satisfied with my life and don't think I'm a failure either), or entitlement... It isn't about fame, or a constant and bigger-than-average craving for validation/recognition (altough like everyone else I do think that having it is nice once in a while)... It's more about self-achievement really, about being brave enough to talk the talk, to decide that you will do what you really love and just make your life around it. About putting all the effort necessary to make this happen. About putting yourself out there.

It was just one of these realizations that suddenly hit you: I am a chronic underachiever. I owed it to myself to try harder, to push harder, to at least do something. I didn't. In three and a half years I'll be officially middle-aged, and I didn't. Instead, I bemoaned, hid, avoided, sulked, felt sorry for my a*s, sabotaged myself a few times and generally showed a pathetic lack of drive. I mean, even the blog is a manifesto of that: there are several different reasons that led me to write in English (it was the language of the communities I was part of, I wanted to see if I could and test my second-language ability, etc.), but there is also maybe 10% that is pure avoidance: by writing in a different language, I didn't even expose myself to that milieu that both fascinated and terrified me.

So. I pinpointed that the reason for me earning a living writing user guides and online help files instead of novels (short stories, essays, articles, whatever, stuff that people actually want to read) is pretty much the same reason why the current house-on-the-market-dragging-on-forever situation is turning into one of the most difficult periods of my life: I deal so f badly with rejection. I much prefer to wrap myself in negativity and self-loathing than to actually dare (hoping, doing).

That's all.