That Time I Almost Gave Up

Remember a few months back when I said I wasn't giving up on writing? Yeah. I almost gave up. I went through a dark phase where I was just too emotionally drained. It's kind of scary how that could happen to you, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. You cry for no reason. You sit there staring at the computer feeling sorry for yourself. You completely stop writing and feel even worse. You feel completely at a loss and don't know how you're gonna make a comeback. Everything seems kind of pointless.

Most people don't realize how much of yourself is invested in your writing. They don't understand all the time and energy and passion you put into those words every single day, every hour. People are like: "It's just writing." No. No, it isn't. IT'S MY LIFE.

It's when you want something so bad, you'll spend days, weeks, months working on something that earns you no money. That keeps you up all hours of the night. That becomes the constant thing on your mind no matter where you are. Most people comment on the fact that I spend all this time and nothing ever comes up it. How can you spend all that time working on something for free? Because I love writing. It is everything to me. And because I want to say one day: "Yep. That's my book."

I don't care about the money. Sure, who doesn't want to quit their day job and become a full time writer? OF COURSE I WANT THAT. But what I want more than anything in the world is to hold a book in my hands that I wrote and know that I did it. I made my dream come true. I'm a published author and this is only the beginning. I don't want to stop at one book, or two. I want to write for the rest of my life, because I've never been more passionate about anything.

So when I hit that rather large bump in the publishing road, I very nearly gave up. I wasn't sure, and I'm still not, whether I'm going to get another agent. I don't know if this book or the next is gonna be the one. And you know what? That scares me more than anything. But what I do know is this:

I love to write.

And if this is all I ever do––if all I do for the rest of my life is write one manuscript after another and nothing comes of it––I'll at least know that I gave it everything I got. And to me, that's all I can ask of myself. I win either way.