The Pain of Staying The Same

I do not believe that the internet is a place to air your innermost thoughts as a kind of personal cathartic laundry for the world to see and smell. I think people who do videos sitting alone in their car who want to tell the world how they feel about something have it all wrong. That is telling the world something hoping they will echo it back to you and validate your belief.

Recently I heard it said in a lecture that you should ask yourself why you say anything that you say. Is it to be agreed with? Is it to contradict someone else? Is it to demand the universe conform to your way of thinking? Is it truly to convey useful information to someone else?

None of what I say next is for anyone to agree with me, disagree with me or help me or hinder me. It is to express something through which perhaps you will find use.

For the last few months I have been quiet. I have stopped writing, and I have stopped posting. My website had become a dead space, and I started out telling you all why, at least to some degree. Why I stopped writing. 

I tried to start writing again, and I realized that behind my discipline was a small nascent belief, that I could make it. I could be a successful author. And in April of 2026 it died, and it hasn’t returned. I wrote but there was no spark. (This piece is not to rehash exactly what was said. see the link to the post above for the most detail I chose to give. In good faith even if I disagree with what has been said to me, writing is a brutal enough industry that I won’t speak ill in proper nouns of those who work in it.) I know the stories I write already. I can picture them in my head, writing them is for other people, not for me. The epic nature of their arcs has already come and gone in the mental telling.

I needed to rebuild what success meant, and what it would look like.

Then some things happened in those months that had all at once more and less impact on me than I thought they would. My father died. There will be more on him, and on that in a different post but as it relates to this, I wanted to say I did not realize how much of what I did as a nearly fifty-year-old man, was still to hear my father say “I’m proud of you.”

We all need a little. One small clap in the corner of someone rooting for us, when we are out of energy out of drive and out of discipline to get up and do it again today. My wife tried to prod me to write, but in that magical balance of being a good partner and friend, versus being annoying and damaging the relationship what she said didn’t penetrate. Not because she wasn’t right.

“What are you going to do with these extra 30 hours a week for the next thirty years?”

Good question. I had no answer.

I gardened. I read a little more. Time just passed.

I can’t tell you what I filled it with, not really. I know I didn’t fill it with this. I didn’t fill it with writing. Because in the back of my mind I kept thinking the sentence. “It doesn’t matter, because nobody is going to read it.” I am thinking it right now as I am writing this. Because I needed to, and still need to readjust my meaning of successful. I have a very reliable core reader group of about 35 of you. If something I say for 35 people is useful, is that not enough? I don’t know. We are going to find out together I suppose.

A year back someone messaged me here, and said “your website is terrible, how much time do you spend on it a week?” We talked. He concluded, “well, I can do at least as well as you, so I guess I should start doing it.”

I actually chuckle now. It was rude as hell, but maybe he went and created something useful.

I say all this to say you need to have more than you. You need more than just one person in your head in your corner. It is said in the story of success there is only one person clapping for you for a very long time. That person is you. For me it was also my father. Every small success he smiled in a way that only he could and would and it mattered.

I started to chide myself, and think, “Why isn’t my wife enough?” I want to impress her.

At a diner with friends D & J (we’ll leave full names out) D chided me for not writing on this site for months. She and J asked why. I referred them to the quitting article above. They pointed out that by means of the publications I already managed I am probably in the top 20% of all people who ever set out to write. (It’s true we see the people in bookstores and famous names. They are all in the top 1%) “Why stop now? How are you going to spend all that extra time?”

How are you going to spend your time...

Time, time, time.

Was I becoming the middle-aged man who was saying “I could have been,” and starting to carry that with me until I was 75 or 80, cranky and dying with a life I failed to keep trying at because I was lied to and people in the industry shut me down in a barrage of rejections for a month. (I have had thousands of rejections over the years. But this was a bad month.) Being lied to is their choice. Being belittled is their choice. Quitting is mine.

Damned that I was. I looked forward, and thought about the statement that I believe to be deeply true. “Change only happens when the pain of staying who you are exceed the pain of change.”

Out of respect for the man I want to be, and fear of who I am becoming, I have started to write again. The fear, a kind of pain, of who I might become, dying angry and bitter at 80 because I didn’t try for the last 25 years, was too much.

I don’t want you to think I want to be doing this. I don’t. I don’t want you to think I believe this is going to work. I don’t. I don’t want you to believe that this is easy, or that I have anything but hurt at what the writing industry has said to me. I don’t.

But my father was proud of me. It wasn’t for my success. It was for the striving. People have done harder things for memory than strive. I owe him that much. My wife has been nudging me for three months to try again. I owe her far more than just striving.

Sometimes we don’t want to do a thing, but we should do it anyway. Sometimes we have to do it for other people. Those who are with us. And those who are not.

So... here we go again. Because the pain has become greater. What does success mean now? I’m not sure. Maybe it is something we craft as we go.