This month has been a busy one. I left the home I’ve lived in for the past six years and I’m starting the search for a new one. It’s a surreal experience, looking for places to live. You try to spread permanence into the roughly twenty minutes you have to look at the place you might spend all of your time in. What would insomnia feel like here? Can I picture myself naked in this room? Can the neighbor’s see? I looked for the smoke detectors for the times when I’m damn sure going to leave something on the stove. It’s about taking your past and laying it over a new place, seeing if you might be able to recreate those old happy moments here. It never works.
As far as writing goes there have been a few rejections that stung a bit more than usual, submissions I was excited about. It’s getting easier, though. They used to bother me more, those barbed disappointments. I’ve been forcing myself to focus on the little successes, the personal victories that I can build confidence around and look back on when doubt begins to creep in. That bitch.
Doubt is a strange demon. It lives in emotion and instinct and is not something that should be approached rationally, so I’m going to approach it rationally.
What is the point of self-doubt? Sure, there’s the theory that it helps you get better – making you look for faults in order to correct them. But I suspect doubt is a close relation to the much more useful suspicion. We need to be suspicious sometimes because it’s how we learn from the past. If we don’t learn from our own mistakes and from being wronged by others, we’re doomed to be fools and victims forever. Doubt is suspicion turned inward. Really, it’s pain avoidance – I’ve tried and failed in the past, and it sucked. It hurt, and I wept, and I don’t want to feel that way again so it really would be best not to try. Wouldn’t you say Old Sport? Is that useful? Perhaps, in certain circumstances, but it’s seldom productive. Doubt can help you in that fight or flight moment, making you ask “Can I handle this? Honestly, do I have this?”
I’ve seen a lack of doubt nearly kill people. One of my earliest childhood memories is of my uncle riding a motorcycle for the first time. I think it was a dirt bike, and I’m certain he wore shorts so short that only the ’80s, or perhaps the ’70s could possibly have allowed it. We were all gathered to watch in the street, sunset gave everything a golden glow. His friend, who had arrived with the bike, was just beginning to explain the throttle and brake when I suppose my uncle decided he’d figure it out as he went. He did not. He mistook the throttle for the brake and went careening directly into a wrought iron railing. Those were more popular back then. He gouged his forearm down to the bone. It was the first exposed bone I had ever seen. I was six years old. It would have been nice to have made it to say ten, but c’est la vie. I remember it with perfect clarity to this day. Doubt might have been useful for my uncle back then, but his lack of doubt, which he wears like a blanket of innocence, is part of what makes him such a wonderful guy and one of my favorite people.
Doubt is also kissing cousins to anxiety, which has plagued me recently. One triggers the other to create the most vicious of cycles and it can be hard to interrupt. As I said, though, it’s been getting easier.
I’m excited about starting a new project – an idea for a novel that grew out of a short story I finished a couple of months ago. I’ve started this one by doing a bunch of research. I’ve really enjoyed that part. Usually, for short stories, my research doesn’t go too far beyond Wikipedia and I’ve only ever done research when I’ve run up against something that required it. I’ve really enjoyed dragging nets through Jstor and going to libraries again.
Updates on the manuscript’s progress to follow!
M. W. IRVING 