I always fail.
If there’s one thing that is consistent in my life and has been ever since I was a child, this would be it. I’m a failure. Everything I have tried to do in my life has, in one way or other, ended in failure. Even the most successful things I’ve done are, in a very real way, a failure.
I’ve been spending the past three years working on a serial fiction story, and even now it gets maybe two viewers a day, if I’m lucky – and they’re the same viewers. I just released a concert band composition and the site it’s on gets exactly zero viewers and has for months. I suppose I could get more if I marketed both of those things, but let’s face it – even if I did, people would check them out and move on. That’s just how it works.
I’m not going to blow smoke up my own ass – some of it is self-sabotage. I’ve done a few things that seemed to have gotten on the verge of success… and I pulled the plug. There was no guarantee they would have succeeded, but it would have been the wrong kind of success – the kind that forces me into a pigeonhole, a mold, from which it would have been difficult to pull myself out of. For example, when Google Plus was a thing, I had six thousand subscribers. By some measures, that was a success – but I suspected that 90 percent of them were bots, and the other ten percent didn’t care. I had maybe ten people who actually seemed to care what I thought. Now, don’t get me wrong, ten people is better than no people, but even then I found myself self-censoring to what I thought they wanted to hear.
And I had a YouTube channel once that looked like it could take off, but the content I was posting was, in my view, a bit too close to pandering, and I didn’t really want to do that. So I deleted all the videos. I still have the channel and use it for commenting, but I don’t post any videos to it anymore.
The truth is, I don’t really know what success looks like, and I’m not sure what I would do with it if I found it. I’m not even sure how I would define it. But all I really know is that everything I’ve tried – including the blog you’re reading right now – has failed miserably.
But the two things I mentioned at the beginning – my serial fiction and my composition(s)… I really want to succeed. And they’re going to fail. I think the serial fiction already has, by every objective measure.
What do I do?