I am struggling to stay Positive right now.

It’s one of my worst faults, my inability to do so, no matter how many people tell me to stop dwelling because it only makes things worse.

I am amazed by some bloggers who keep the venting to a minimum. There’s that adage: “If you don’t have anything nice to say…” blah blah you know the rest. Sometimes I think about that and force myself to write something very vague here to avoid the negativity I’m sure readers don’t want to hear. Sometimes I skip a day and don’t write anything at all, which is what happened yesterday. Sometimes I can’t help it—negativity is in my nature—and it just comes out.

Yesterday at work a coworker, a person I like very much, gave notice. It’s what she said she wanted, and I only wanted her to be happy. So I’m happy she’s happy, I am. Then the reality set in: when she leaves, some of her workload may well fall onto me, and I’ve already been taking my work home to keep up. Also, she’s one of the few friends I have at the office. She’s funny. She’ll soon be gone. What did I do?

I’m not in actuality upset. I do believe people should go for their dreams, and this job is one step closer to her dream. I was told yesterday that I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, that I’m better than this (copyediting) and I should look for something else. But I don’t want to look for something else. A job is a job. My dream is to be a writer, not to have a fancy job. This job pays the bills—well, not really, but it tries. What I should do, what I’ve seen others do, is get offers on other jobs, bring them back to this job, and get a higher salary, and more respect, from it. People kick and scream and the people who kick and scream are, in my experience, the ones who seem to get the rewards. If you sit quietly behind your desk doing your work and putting in your time, people tend to forget you. This keeps happening to me. When I’ve thought about kicking and screaming I end up whispering. I don’t want to be the person who puts up a stink to get her window office, as I’ve seen happen. I just don’t think it’s fair to act like that. But when I ask politely (which, if you know me, takes an amazing amount of courage), nothing happens… so guess who wins?

I always thought that if you worked hard at something, if you didn’t give up, you would be rewarded. But not so. Look at my writing “career”: all the nos I’ve racked up from literary agents, and I’ve been actively trying to do this for five, six, seven, eight (?) years. If I had, perhaps, been more pushy with my writing contacts from grad school or elsewhere maybe I would have gotten notice and some help. I never did that. When I tried to be pushy—I liked to think of it as assertive—I fell flat on my face. This—me, sitting here—is the outcome of being unable to network, being too shy to be pushy, hoping, just simply hoping, that some stranger will magically decide to help me publish a book. I am trying to go after my dream every day, I am. But maybe I’m too quiet about it, because I don’t know if it’s helping.

The P-word has flown out of my mind this morning. I do apologize.

I am going to stop talking about this now and do the only thing I know to do, the only thing that could possibly, one day, if I were lucky, help:

Write.