waiting game

Roughly half my brain now is focused on doing life things, but the rest of me is like a dog with a bone about this query response.

Last night, rather than sleeping, I mentally dissected my manuscript six ways to Sunday.  No sooner would I disavow the thing entirely than I would I get passionately caught up in a defense of it. I went through so many scenarios - what might happen with this one query - that I was spinning. My stomach roiled, churning up acid and refusing to settle, as I considered all the possibilities. The unknown was out there - either a winning lottery ticket or an open-handed slap in the face - and though I knew I should accept that there was nothing I could do to change what would come, I couldn't. I worried, and worried some more.

Finally, I drifted off around midnight, after deciding to replace my Rumi introduction to book three with a better-fitting introduction by Khalil Gibran. I had plenty of other ideas, too, but I cast them off as the product of late-night hysteria. (Now, of course, I've decided that some of those ideas must have been good, but trying to relocate them is about as likely as finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.)

Five hours later, I awoke to the buzzing of my phone; another Twitter user had followed me - the 27th to do so after what I consider possibly the most inane tweet I've ever composed. Since that aforementioned tweet, I've more than doubled my followers (I mean, I had 20-something before...so it wasn't hard), but now I can't seem to find the courage to compose any new tweets. These authors are all following me because I claimed to be a writer, who, as the tweet went, had finished her manuscript, blahblahblah. Now, though, impostor syndrome is kicking in. Am I really a writer? Or have I just written things? How can you continue to tweet about writing if you aren't putting anything out that matters?

The funny thing, though, is that this is all good news. This terrible, horrible feeling is familiar. It's the same sensation I've had when I've loved someone so deeply that any absence, or wavering of that love made the world feel off-center. It's the feeling of having created or experienced something so entirely meaningful that it can wreck your universe, completely shatter your life. And that's why right now, I feel sick as a dog. I can't eat, because I'm terrified that this thing I've dedicated 29 months to finishing might be rejected, again. And I'm running on a strange, live-wire brand of adrenaline, which fuels my hope (which is beyond all sensibility) that someone else can see the spark in this manuscript, and help me bring it to life.