Why the world doesn't need my writing

Some hard truths from my sick bed

It's been a hard few weeks.

A sinus infection that seems resistant to antibiotics and steroids has dominated my summer. I recover for a day or two and then relapse into achy exhaustion. I have cancelled long planned events, struggled through others and been frustrated throughout.

As some readers may know, I have ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. From long experience I know how to manage my condition. This infection is different. I don't know its rules, what it wants from me and when it will depart.

In times like these I circle the wagons. The regular work I am paid to do takes priority in the limited time I have available. I am passionately committed to this work so it's right and proper that this should be my first concern. Yet that means forgoing my wider, freelance, writing career; eschewing opportunities, leaving thoughts unwritten.

Hence the lack of newsletter for the last few weeks. In fact, I am only writing this one in short bursts on my phone while lying down in bed.

I hope it doesn't sound bitter for me to observe that no one seems to have noticed my silence. Because that lack of public clamour for my writing isn't just a reflection of my own limited profile, it's also the norm for most writers. 

How many writers are noticed by their absence? How many writers have followers who crave the next publication like a fix?

They do certainly exist. I myself impatiently await new works by novelists I love (Garry Disher, Dave Hutchinson and Becky Chambers to name but three) and devour their books as soon as they are published. I would certainly notice if my favourite columnists or music critics went dark.

But most literary diets are bulked up by a vast mass of other writers, whose names we may not notice, who provide transitory reading pleasures, who offer insights that are interesting at most, but who are fundamentally dispensable. In a world full of online publishing opportunities and authors desperate to write, we are the ones who feed the beast.

I am not writing this out of false modesty or fishing for complements. I have written books and articles that people have enjoyed and found interesting. I have made an impact in some existing debates and helped kickstart others. Occasionally I have even moved readers when I talk of my experiences as a person which a chronic health condition.

I am proud of my work. But I am also not satiated by it. The reverse in fact - the more I publish the more desperate I am to write. And when I can't write I am lost and anxious.

This is the paradox: Having built up a substantial body of work, I have become more convinced of my essential inessentiality compared to the time when I had only published a modest amount. And this acknowledgement of how little I am 'needed' makes me want to publish more more more, which only increases my sense of redundancy.

One of the best writers I know is an old friend who has barely published anything. That's partially because he is housebound with a serious health condition that allows him very limited writing time. It's also because he is a perfectionist with a strong commitment to the integrity of what he writes. Currently, he is working on a book that he feels needs to be written; a book that contains a transformative contribution to a long-running debate. He may well be right. What strikes me though is that, while his desire to write the book is unwaveringly powerful, he doesn't seem to feel what I feel: That maddening sense that I have to get something out now now now; that sense that leads me to compromise, to write what editors want or to self-publish half-formed ideas.

My suspicion is that there might be an inverse relationship between the desire to publish and the importance of what one writes. People like me will get stuff out there, will sometimes make a modest kind of impact, but will be forgotten fairly swiftly when we stop writing. People like my friend will risk never publishing anything, but when they do publish they can change the world.

The universe can wait patiently for a genius writer with a sinus infection to recover. The same cannot be said for a mere good writer with a sinus infection.

So here I am, maddened by my inactivity, scared of being forgotten, finger-typing in an exhausted body, desperate to be part of the great conversation - and ensuring in the process my own ultimate smallness.