Trying to Be Positive about Chucking my Time and Energy into What May as well Be a Black Hole

Applying for things sucks. I have somehow chosen a life full of rejection not on one-side, folks, but somewhere around 3-4 sides.

I apply for jobs all the time, and you so infrequently even hear back, it's hard not to get discouraged. Will someone even see this? This cover letter I just spent two hours writing? Plus I write, like, outside of cover letters, which is like, synonymous with rejection. It's hard to spend all that energy revising a play when you know you're going to have to send it to like ninety festivals to get one little reading...and even then, that's not guaranteed. I am reentering a life with auditions, and just when you find the perfect apartment, someone snatches is up from under your nose.

I already feel my skin thickening from this new year in this new city.

Yet, there is a different perspective. One that could be a lie, but one that is necessary if I want to survive. That perspective is It Adds Up. Maybe this cover letter no one even opened, but I still wrote it. I still got better at writing it. There will be plays that never see the light of day, but they were exercises. Exercises I didn't know were exercises. But you just have to accept that.

Shell and I love our move in the making. Our goal date is June 1st, 2015. Even if we make it, then we have to make it, and those odds are just ridiculous. Yet, we will write anyway. Because it's part of the whole (again, at least I say to myself). For some reason this is harder for artists to accept than most humans? A mathematician doesn't think her entire education to become what she is was useless because it didn't get published. But for us goobers at the laptops it's like, "Yeah I wrote that poem. It was bad. Nothing ever came of it." No, you dingo, the thing you're doing now came of it.