A funny thing happened on the way down Memory Lane

[randy_byers]

So as I was writing about Joanna Russ over the weekend, I thought it might be cute to find the paragraph of hers I'd mimicked and post it along with my version. So last night I pulled out the ancient folder containing the story I did this for, "Singularities". It smelled of mildew, although the paper all looked clean. Notebook paper with

Comments

[voidampersand]

When you can tell what was wrong about it, you're halfway there. The rest is just a simple, repetitive and brutally painful process of keeping at it.

[randy_byers]

Yeah, I definitely did not have the keep-at-it attitude. That's part of what made me realize that fiction was not my thing. Which is fine. It's just weird that I still have such strong feelings about it.

[fishlifter]

What I didn't realize is that moving on didn't mean those old feelings of failure, disappointment, and self-loathing ... had been resolved

Had this recently, reflecting on my career as part of trying to apply for employment by my employer in future. A good outcome of this sort of unanticipated reflection is when it can lead you back not just to remembering how you started instead to do something 'that is a much better fit for who I am' but to feeling grounded in who you now are, and good about that. But I suspect it's normal for the regret (and the nostalgia) to hang around for who you might have been, and how it felt being who you were.

[randy_byers]

Yes, part of what I'm getting from this is just how powerful that old dream was to me. Even in jaded middle age the dream apparently has the power to jolt me with its death throes.