Americans put a lot of desire and energy toward joining some very limited group of people. Two million people writing novels hoping to be one of 10,000 professional authors. One million high school football players hoping to be one of 1,696 professionals.
The Olympics repeats the pattern again. There are 327 thousand competitive swimmers in the world. Maybe twelve of them will get a medal in something.
This is an artifact of globalization, mass media and, I suspect, profound loneliness.
The loneliness is me extrapolating from myself. I’m a pretty seriously ADD introvert, and I have far too few friends. Not prioritizing friendship enough has been one of my great regrets throughout my life.
So a lot of my contact with people was through media I consumed. Michael Chabon, N.K. Jemison, Peter S. Beagle are people whose contact in my life feels real. I wanted to be able to talk to them not as one of their millions of fans, but as one of the few thousand in their field.
Now, that’s a pretty stupid fantasy. I’ve talked to Peter S. Beagle. This isn’t much of a claim to fame. He went on a publicity tour, and I stayed in line to get a book signed. My own awkwardness is a much bigger barrier than my not being a professional author.
I’ve heard people ascribe various aspects of our life to this kind of game that almost everyone loses. Depression, voting for Trump and drug addiction, I’ve heard, are various ailments attributed to this game we’re set up for that almost everyone loses.
One thing I regret in my own youth is treating other people who wrote fiction more as rivals than kindred spirits. I’ve written a couple novels that didn’t get published. Every time I meet someone else who has a novel that they get excited about or just an idea, it made me feel less special.
And I wanted to be special in a good way because I really felt special in a bad way. I was ADD, which isn’t very special. I’d selected a bunch of friends that were ADD, which isn’t hard since it’s about one person in ten.
So I’m not really unique. I’m an ADD person who dreams up stories, and this country alone has probably five million people like me. Is that really a terrible thing. I’m far from alone, which is really what I wanted.
I don’t have a great conclusion, but I’m trying to feel better about writing that doesn’t get the very rare kind of acceptance I’m longing for, because I’ve looked at that longing, and it’s really misguided when I see it up close.
I’ll try to be more appreciative of the talents I see around me. I see some amazing artists who are also underappreciated. I’ll try to lend more support to my fellow people who are striving. They are my comrades, not my enemies.
