Is the fateful day just around the corner?

Even after having authored 169 op-ed essays over the years--yes, I counted them a few minutes ago--there is a worry in the back of my mind: what if there is nothing more in me to write about?

This worry is not anything new.  It has been the case for a long time now, though I am not certain when exactly this emotion kicked in.  It is a terrible nightmare.  A nightmare of my own creation, no doubt.  But, it comes up, especially soon after an op-ed is published.

Dreading about failure is not unique to me by any means.  And to write about such a fear is also a typical approach that writers take, I would think.  It is cathartic. Further, if we lower our bars ourselves, then we come out looking good if we do produce something, right? ;)

failure in writing is more of an intimately crushing day-to-day thing. O.K., minute-to-minute. Measured against your ideal of yourself.

You see how that writer describes the failure as an intimate experience that is triggered by measuring "against your ideal of yourself" and yet she writes about it for the entire world?  I tell ya, such public cleansing avoids what would otherwise be a huge expense of gazillions of dollars that we don't have on shrinks!

When I started going down this path of a lowly-paid faculty who wanted to write op-eds, I used to send copies for my father to read--after all, the op-eds are on topics that would interest him too.  Once he asked me how much I got paid for the op-eds, and was shocked to hear me tell him that there was no money involved.  But, hey, there are things we do in life for money, and then there are things we do in life.  If writing is what we do, then writing is what we do whether we get paid nor not, and whether we succeed or fail.

As you get older, rest assured, you accept failure as part of your writing life. You realize the many forms failure can take: There is sentence-to-sentence failure, in which the words fly from your brain out the window or throw themselves on the page like suicide bombers. There is the failure to get on the page what is in your head. There is a failure of will. There is organizational failure, in which you wind up collapsing.
You develop strategies to deal with it all. You develop a kind of sixth sense, a detective’s intuition about what will fail and what won’t. But above all, no matter how much you fail, you still sit down at your computer every day, and you keep going.

Exactly!  It is every single day at the computer reading, blogging, and then every once in a while piecing together an op-ed.  And then worrying that the well has dried up.

But, hey, at least my writing makes sense--even if only occasionally!

BTW, one more round of editing and I will email #170 to the editor. Phew; apparently not this corner! ;)