Oh no it's another one of these, run away while you still can.
This entire post is going to seem weirdly-timed, given that I was recently asked to contribute to and was accepted into an anthology of short stories, but that particular occasion of good fortune rather more underlines what I'm about to say, as for some reason it's made no difference to the way I feel, rather than providing me with a much-needed boost to the writerly ego. Admittedly I did approach with an unparalleled level of pessimism: after being specifically approached to write something for it on the basis of recent work, having the first 1000 words confirmed as "exciting" and assurance given that unless I completely humped the doge I was not in with a chance of NOT being accepted, I still submitted the finish piece with a sense of "knowing my luck, that will all turn out to have been supportive garbagewater and they're not going to take it because it's mediocre and aimless and doesn't conform to the brief".
An ability to enthuse to others about your own work is absolutely necessary from a selling point of view, whether you're selling the finished piece as a book or trying to convince an agent that they want to take it; in self-publishing I've noticed that being able to give people cheerful updates on your progress and happily explain what the book is about without giving up half-way through or using powerfully self-denigrating and dismissive language makes them - shock, horror - more inclined to buy the damn thing.
Again, and also, this is not just an inability to recover self-esteem in the face of indifference, thus contributing to further indifference: there have been many times in my adult life where people have been enthused about a creative project of mine and my response has been to become horrified, realise the project is awful, and drop it like a hot rock. I cannot put the blame on anyone's shoulders but my own for my flat lack of pleasure and confidence in anything that I produce.
After interviewing a couple of people about how they maintain their own enthusiasm and/or positive beliefs I've run into an interesting variety. One person has the same problem that I do with the sudden "oh god this is rubbish" and deals with it, unfortunately, in the same way: seeking validation from people who are likely to be into the idea and bolster her spirits. This is a problem as my "oh god this is rubbish" now precedes actually writing anything, and is becoming increasingly resistant to validation from close friends and partners, or anyone else who can be reasonably relied upon to respond to requests for it: other parties are pretty much guaranteed to be too busy or to have already decided I don't write things which are for them.
Another perspective provided me with an insight into the fundamental nature of the problem: one friend said she'd never really had any doubts about the quality of her work, having been assured from an early age that she was naturally talented. What interests me about this response is that I was also assured from an early age that I was terribly clever and good at things, but rather than then receiving reinforcement of this idea, I got either disinterest at the end result (my mother is not good at faking enthusiasm either) or a persistent disappointment: oh, come on, you can do better than that. I don't know if the latter was supposed to spur me on into trying harder to correct deficiencies (my school reports, aside from "needs to learn about shutting up" are peppered consistently with "good ideas, sloppy presentation" and notes on various essays with a tone of frustration "if you had just put some effort into polishing this I could have given you the A it deserves", to which the response was invariably "but if I can get a B+ without trying why should I?"), but what it invariably did was send me to look for more easily-impressed recipients to validate my work.
Which now places me in the position where I believe the only possible outcomes are "person likes thing I have made and isn't picking holes in it or just trying to get away from having to look at it" = "they are an easily-impressed idiot", or "doesn't want to look at thing because thing is terrible and I am disappointing". Or to look at it more briefly: my "potential" is illusory. I am disappointingly excellent at convincing people that I could be good at thing, but I will never actually be good at thing and so my life is destined to be a series of previously-enthused people withdrawing their support in disgust.
The other conversation I had about writing was with Lindsay, where he asked: if you were alone on a desert island with hundreds of notebooks and no chance of anyone reading it, would you write? Yes, I said. Oodles. Loads and loads. And if you were guaranteed that no one would ever read your stories, would you write? No, I said. I don't think I'd bother. And I'd be very angry about it.
What's the difference? Lindsay had difficulty with this. The difference I guess is this melodramatic analogy: imagine you fell down and broke your leg in a deserted street. Clearly no one is going to come and help you up, so you struggled to your one good foot and try to get yourself to a more comfortable place, or - if you are in the wilderness - you accept your fate. Now imagine you fall down and break your leg in a busy street, but no one stops to help. No one asks if you are okay or phones an ambulance. They just step over you. Now imagine someone else wobbles, and immediately receives offers of help. Now imagine some of the people offering help are your friends. There is a difference.
Before I had people around who had once demonstrated enthusiasm or curiosity about things I'd written, I just wrote for the hell of it. Even after getting rejected from a couple of publishers, what I got was helpful in return: you need to work on X, or Y. You have definite potential. Of course, I was a teenager then: old, ugly adults who have failed to launch their lives are rightfully consigned to the scrap heap: the people who continue receiving a leg up are the people who smile at strangers.
So at this stage in the post I'm vacillating between "this is a fundamental problem with the kind of person that I am, which cannot be fixed, and which means I may as well quit" (which is my favourite solution to everything because it means I don't have to try and can additionally wallow in good old familiar comforting self-hatred), and "there is an issue here with my motivation and self-image which can be fixed, hopefully leading to better reception of my work which will then improve my self-image" because these things are after all feedback loops.
The favoured adage is "fake it till you make it", which troubles me. I started out faking it, with a soupçon of belief, and now I am at a point where I am willing to accept that, in addition to my lack of confidence driving everyone away, I also have no bed of skills on which to build any confidence, and should stop, and save the people who love me the effort of expending pity on someone who insists on making a moron of themselves in public. No one likes being guilt-tripped into professing to enjoy something, and that is all I have since I began to understand that claiming I think my own work is worthwhile would represent a gaping hole in what is otherwise quite rigorously enforced parameters of taste.
Although, if we return to the beginning: how can I possibly determine whether I'm merely mediocre or actively bad? I cannot countenance the "good" category because I think that would override my ruinous lack of confidence causing doubt in other people and lead to readerly enthusiasm in spite of me; but how can I tell? If I assume all compliments are platitudes or signs of idiocy and low standards, and absence of self-belief prevents me from having the stamina to keep trying for an honest response (one with words in it, not "you've passed the standard deadline so assume we don't want it" and that sort of thing), and I keep writing these posts?
The problem, the ongoing problem, the continuing problem, the interminable problem is that I am not enjoying it, and I don't know why. My broken leg analogy feels like a good reason, but I am acutely aware that I will happily take any explanation that means I get away without being the party at fault. And I am the party at fault: I have written in a variety of genres, and there have been no bites: I have written over a long period of time, and I have only lost admirers and not gained them. As the quality of my work can hardly have deteriorated so much as to shake tolerant people off that hard.
But why go on?