Hollering into the void

It's a rough day. I'm supposed to be working on my novel, or some other form of fiction, and I'm just torn between an existential crisis and a pity party. There's nothing I can say that matters to anyone - even begging for feedback gets me radio silence, so I can't even elicit negative feelings towards my writing. I thought getting bad feedback would be the worst thing, but it turns out, getting absolutely nothing is even worse.

I'm not sure why I even write, today. I like telling stories, but an important part of telling the story is the audience, and I don't have one of those. I used to be OK with that - it used to be OK to tell myself stories and just tell them loudly enough that if other people wanted to hear them, that would be OK. Now, I need other people to hear them, and no one's there. It's incredibly prideful and bigheaded of me to believe that what I have to say would matter to anyone else, and it obviously doesn't, since no one responds to it, so there's that - turns out that all of the lessons about being humble that I got in Sunday School were right.

I don't know why I bother, since it's no longer enough to tell stories just for myself. I want other people to like the stories I tell, and they don't - or at least, the stories don't elicit enough emotion to get people to say if they like or don't like them at all. They're apathetic towards them, and putting in the effort to create something that other people literally couldn't care less about is incredibly painful. I need to rewind and get back to writing for myself, first and foremost, and forgetting about any kind of audience, because I haven't earned an audience. I haven't done enough to deserve people's attention, and it's greedy of me to believe that I'm entitled to it.

I'll fight the urge to delete everything right now, but that urge is strong - there doesn't feel like any point to keep anything I've written, when it's all crap nobody cares about, but maybe I'm just having a bad brain day, and tomorrow (or next week, or next month) I'll feel better about it and will be able to try again. For now, I'll just scream into the void and stop expecting the void to answer.

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