So, I haven't actually submitted my work very much. Lots of reasons:

*I don't like the word "submit." In fact, I hate it.

*Handing something you care about over to another entity just seems like another way of discovering how different you are from others. That would be okay, but there's almost no interactive dynamic to make it okay.

*I have low self-esteem sometimes.

*Also, huge over-inflated ego issues that make it hard to deign to #1.

*It takes me a really long time to finish pieces, either that or I feel like I'm done with them afterwards, so done in fact that I want nothing to do with them. By the time I finish, I'm either really sick of (and hate) my work, or it seems somehow outdated. I don't like bothering with it; the puzzle has been solved.

*I also paradoxically like seeing projects through all the way. Not handing them off. Binding them myself and then giving them out. I made them, after all, so why should I pass them off incomplete to someone I don't know?

*Sometimes it all feels like a competition amongst friends and foes alike, and I fucking hate competition. I hate the idea of it, and I even hate the word, although not as much as "submit."

*I definitely don't like rejection.

So, I've been rejected. It's embarrassing, but it's for the first time, and I thought I had a shot at being a finalist, but apparently didn't even warrant a rejection notice (I found out by checking the website that announced ongoing events / contest-winners). It would have been nice to have been notified, maybe even a personal sentence or two, or something saying "press on." It's hard to believe in myself these days, and I've told myself that this is The Summer to either do it or stop it. Get a real job, or actually make something. After all these years, I feel like a bit of a poser. And a dumbass too.

Sigh. I hate being rejected.

P.S. And this is bitchy, but N told me last weekend while begging me to come rescue her that things will come back to me "multifold" if I help her, which is something she's told me for years about the energy that people (I amongst them) put out there. This, if true, apparently doesn't apply very much to those things I (and others, including N) care about. The energy that comes back seems so random and inexplicable. Sometimes this seems beautiful, in the same way that the sinewy tendrils on a sugar-snap curl around a metallic fence; but on days like these, it just seems like misplaced hope. blah.

P.P.S. I did get my first thank-you card and present from a student in years though. It was pretty exuberant and couldn't have been a suck-up card because it was for the class I don't grade. She said that I made her nightmare class (the reason she hadn't gone back to school in forever) a pleasure and removed all the fear from writing. And she did move from barely writing a paragraph at the beginning of class to writing 5-page papers at the end. I guess I ought to stop sulking because it was incredibly nice to be thanked.