I always fail.

If there’s one thing that is consistent in my life and has been ever since I was a child, this would be it.  I’m a failure.  Everything I have tried to do in my life has, in one way or other, ended in failure.  Even the most successful things I’ve done are, in a very real way, a failure.

I’ve been spending the past three years working on a serial fiction story, and even now it gets maybe two viewers a day, if I’m lucky – and they’re the same viewers.  I just released a concert band composition and the site it’s on gets exactly zero viewers and has for months.  I suppose I could get more if I marketed both of those things, but let’s face it – even if I did, people would check them out and move on.  That’s just how it works.

I’m not going to blow smoke up my own ass – some of it is self-sabotage.  I’ve done a few things that seemed to have gotten on the verge of success… and I pulled the plug.   There was no guarantee they would have succeeded, but it would have been the wrong kind of success – the kind that forces me into a pigeonhole, a mold, from which it would have been difficult to pull myself out of.  For example, when Google Plus was a thing, I had six thousand subscribers.  By some measures, that was a success – but I suspected that 90 percent of them were bots, and the other ten percent didn’t care.  I had maybe ten people who actually seemed to care what I thought.  Now, don’t get me wrong, ten people is better than no people, but even then I found myself self-censoring to what I thought they wanted to hear.

And I had a YouTube channel once that looked like it could take off, but the content I was posting was, in my view, a bit too close to pandering, and I didn’t really want to do that.   So I deleted all the videos.  I still have the channel and use it for commenting, but I don’t post any videos to it anymore.

The truth is, I don’t really know what success looks like, and I’m not sure what I would do with it if I found it.  I’m not even sure how I would define it.  But all I really know is that everything I’ve tried – including the blog you’re reading right now – has failed miserably.

But the two things I mentioned at the beginning – my serial fiction and my composition(s)… I really want to succeed.  And they’re going to fail.  I think the serial fiction already has, by every objective measure.

What do I do?