Five days until we go to London.

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I wish I were failing at something.

But in order to fail at something, you have to try something, and I haven’t tried lately.

Catching up on my friend Aaron’s blog, Aaron the poet, whose poetry is featured in magazines, who does poetry readings, who has won some poetry fellowships. I’m not interested in being a poet, but I do need to do more writing. I need to try and I’m not trying.

When I was out of work several months ago, I was thisclose to getting a writing job with a gay rights organization. I think I would have been hired. The money would probably have been much less than I’m making now, but maybe it would have led somewhere unpredictable. I told myself not to think about what-ifs, because happiness is all about attitude and outlook, not about your present situation.

I talked with my therapist last week about how my brother, who didn’t go to grad school and therefore has no student debt, is making lots more money than me, who went into debt for a law degree that I got without thinking about it carefully enough.

She asked me why I never went to work for a law firm. I told her that it’s not primarily the hours – although I don’t think I could deal with working until 10 pm at night or later. It’s the person you need to be in order to be a law firm lawyer. You need to like conflict. You need to be able to be a jerk. I don’t like conflict and I don’t like being a jerk. It’s the quality of being a law firm lawyer, not the quantity of the work involved, that really turns me off from it. (Okay, it’s a bit of both.)

She concluded that with my talents, with my qualities, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be making a good amount of money doing something I enjoy.

And it’s true that if I had more confidence in myself, and, moreover, if I were more willing to fail, I could be further along that road than I am right now. On the other hand, my attempt at writing an op-ed piece last summer went nowhere. I wrote it, got it published, blogged about it, and it caused a very minor blog controversy before it disappeared down a black hole. In retrospect, I wasn’t too happy with what I wrote. So after that, I gave up.

I’d love to be an essayist, get my stuff printed in magazines, on op-ed pages, online, and so forth. If only I didn’t, somewhere deep down, think I sucked as a writer.

This is all old hat to longtime readers of the blog, and nobody likes a whiner. I’m really writing these words more to write them than for you to read them.

But in short, I should try to fail.