“I can’t do this. I’m not good enough, and I can’t make people care.”

Those are the things that run through my mind with an alarming frequency these days. It doesn’t seem to matter what the context is. Writing, relationships, job prospects– more often than not, my reactions are the same. 

It’s not unsupported doubt. It’s not as though I snapped into awareness after a successful run suddenly besieged by it. The doubt started slowly. Maybe it only lingered around my toes for years. Relationships have never been my strength, so as one of the most important of my life eroded, the doubt settled somewhere around my knees– not suffocating, just prepared to take out my legs when the prospect for future relationships wavered hazily in the distance. 

Even now as I try to push past it, to make my leaden limbs move in baby steps toward something, I hear, “What’s the point? It would never work. You’ll never make him happy.” Of course, I was dumped, essentially, by a man I’ve never met recently (quite the trick, really), so the voice isn’t entirely wrong.

In case you haven’t noticed, my writing isn’t exactly taking the world by storm. People have been kind. They’ve said nice things. But no one is writing a check. Job offers aren’t flooding in to me. Managers aren’t hanging around my PO box hoping for a minute of my time. Nothing of mine is going viral (which, normally, I feel is a good thing, but in this case apparently not).

I don’t know how to make people care. I don’t know how to be good enough at what I’m doing to change anything into a positive. I can’t will what I want to happen. So, instead, I sit here feeling the doubt plant itself in my stomach. It’s brought along its friend dread, and they’ve started to squeeze. With each misstep, unanswered query or disinterested stare, I close my eyes and falter.

“I can’t do this. I’m not good enough, and I can’t make people care.”