“I never had a dream come true,” sang the popular beat combo outfit S Club 7, adding, “Til the day I found you.” I don’t think I have ever wanted a dream to come true because almost all of mine are anxiety dreams. If my dreams came true, I’d probably get sectioned PDQ. However, I still have a dream, even if it isn’t quite at the level of Martin Luther King’s.
Despite an obvious lack of success, I have thrown everything at my writing in the last 20 years, particularly in the last five. I stuck with the Bristol Rovers programme long after Nick Higgs and others sucked all the love I had for the club out of my system. I did a year for the excellent B24/7 on-line magazine. I’ve written for all kinds of people and organisations and even today folk ask me to write for them, but always for nothing. It’s killing me. The one thing people say I am good at and there’s no way of making a living out of it.
As well as this blog, I’m involved in writing two books, one in conjunction with someone else, I am about to start writing for another website and I’ve been asked to write something for a local newsletter. On the face of it, things are going better than ever. But they aren’t, really. I’m still working part time for a take home pay of less than the minimum wage at my most productive writing times of the day three days a week. If you think I am feeling very sorry for myself, you are right.
I’m beginning to get depressed about things again and my prolific, albeit unsuccessful writing career is playing a major role in that, together with some things I understand and other things I don’t. The spectre of failure has always hung heavy over my very existence ever since I was old enough to realise how unsuccessful I was. (That started when I was at school at the age of 12 and has carried on until this day.)
“Why on earth are you depressed? You have so many good things in your life?” Oh god, not that one again. I don’t really need a motivational speaker to pretend he can cure my mental illness. He can’t cure cancer, for fuck’s sake, so don’t pretend depression isn’t an illness.
I never dreamed of being a rock star because I can’t sing, write music or play anything – a bit like Kanye West, really. I never dreamed of being a footballer because I was never any good. And for some silly reason, I did dream that one day I might make a living as a writer, a dream that like West Ham’s bubbles, is fading and dying.
I fear I am going to my grave having achieved nothing in the one thing I always wanted to do. I’m depressed about it, probably a bit sorry for myself about it, but more than that I am resigned to the inevitability of failure.
It’s not about the money, money, money; and yet it kind of is because it would be the measure of success. Yes, I need to write and I am going to carry on, but with each passing day, a bit of me dies.
