Being Adopted & Achieving Long Term Goals

Normally, I don't talk about non-adoption personal stuff in this blog. This probably makes me come off as humorless, negative and no doubt, really intense.

There's one challenge I continue to face and I'm wondering, can it too be linked to adoption?

Once upon a time, I was a good news producer. Then I was a fairly decent radio producer. Okay, high strung but that's a prerequisite for those sorts of jobs.

Once, I threw an old typewriter at a reporter because he begged for extra time and the lead in my newscast, then bagged me by coming up with a one-minute lame ass excuse for a story just before airtime. After the show, I chased him around the newsroom and we had a screaming match. I thought I was going to get fired. Instead, the news director slapped me on the back and said, "Thank God. I thought you'd never grow some balls."

Throw a deadline and a bunch of curve balls and I'll make it. You can count on me. Nina does deadlines.

Okay, so why can't I finish writing a novel? My lifelong dream? My ultimate goal?

My computer is litered with evidence of my failure to complete:

a) Ten decent chapters of a young adult novel set in the near future after an environmental disaster;

b) Twelve chapters of a novel about a successful Latina professional forced to move back to L.A. where she must deal with her difficult family while trying to save her company by finding Hispanic business clients when she can't speak Spanish;

c) An entire draft of 250 pages of a young adult horror novel featuring a murderous mother ghost and, yes, spontaneous combustion; (okay, go ahead, laugh-but I've always been obsessed by spontaneous combustion since I was a kid);

d) Other false starts too numerous to mention.

SO WHAT THE HELL???

Why do I lose steam? Why did I abandon the 250 page draft? Why didn't I rewrite the damn thing? All these efforts were made before I admitted adoption was a big deal, before therapy and long before reunion.

Recently, I heard a radio interview in which a novelist was asked why she waited until her forties to begin writing and she said that whatever crisis she had faced freed her to write.
Mmm.

Then, while rereading Betty Jean Lifton's, Lost & Found: The Adoption Experience, I came across this quote by adoptive father and psychologist William Reynolds:

"The adoptee is inclined to be a rather shy and personally wary individual who is ill at ease in dealing with others. Impulsive in decision making, whose self-image tends to be remote and untrusting, who has real difficulty persisting at tasks without immediate rewards, and whose tolerance for frustration and delay is minimal."

Umph. Seen in that light, it's no wonder I gravitated toward news production. The rewards are immediate. You roll in to work, spend the next eight hours assemblying a newscast, then you put on a show and you sit in the control room and have the satisfaction of watching your product flash on the screens before you.

Writing a novel requires self-motivation and persistence. The reward is unsure. Publication is a hope and dream. There are many frustrations and delays. Umph again. Writing also requires self-esteem. Belief that you have something interesting to say in a fresh way.

Okay, I don't want to make this post too long and I'll continue it, but any thoughts on the link between creativity, the difficulty of achieving long term goals and being adopted? I've started yet another draft of a novel, but this time, it's about adoption and I'm trying a more structured approach: character analysis, plot outline, theme list, etc. and this I really want to finish.