Despair

Here's a excerpt from my daily journal, dated Wednesday, February 11, 2015, which pretty much describes what I've been going through lately:

As I write this, I feel despair.  I feel like, if I were really meant to be a writer, if I really had any talent at all to write, I wouldn't be going through what I am with Chapter One, Scene One yet again.  You read about some reader-who-knows taking a look at some writer's work, and immediately recognizing in it undeniable talent, even greatness.  Well, I think it's safe to say, when my beta reader read the version of C1S1 that I knew had some problems, but was as good as I was able to write (I hasten to add, without someone providing detailed feedback on it), he probably didn't think I had undeniable talent.  And he sure as hell didn't think I had greatness–not with the number of changes he made.  So the despair I feel not is about thinking I'm wasting my time.  It's about acknowledging I've always had to work for every bloody thing I get, and the result was still far under what others might have achieved with much less effort.  And it's about wondering if I'll even finish my novel at this rate, let alone see it published.  Or is that even the purpose of all this?  Maybe I'm meant to go through this process for the journey, for what I'll learn about myself and life and the world.  But how I'd love to earn good money with my writing, so I can pay back Chris, for how good he's been to me, giving me the time to do this, showing such faith in me.

And, later, I wrote this:

I worry I've worked so hard on this, spent so many hours on it, that it's lost its freshness, all naturalness.  It's getting to the point where I'm not sure I want to do this anymore, or if I'm even capable of doing it.  What if I'm not?  What if I'm only fooling myself?  This isn't the first time I've thought working on a novel may not be my thing.  If I should be working on, for example, personal essays, which are much like blog posts, and much easier for me to write.  And if that's where any money I might earn in the future could come from, then why do I continue doing this to myself?  Is this potentially a five-year-long mistake, that I should have figured out long ago, so I didn't waste any more time, and really do what I'm supposed to?