Why I Feel That Way

Lately I have been impatient to get my poetry manuscript out to contests that tantalizingly hang just above me, so close I can almost reach them. It's been so many years of accumulating poems, culling them, weeding the patch, that I want to get them out there, now that there are enough of them to make a book.
I could just enter them in contests. But for some reason I can't fathom, I have been feeling deeply that someone not me has to read them first, approve, make suggestions.
I realize, thinking about this, since no one can do this task for me, that I feel this way because this is how I became a writer. I did it for the people I knew. It was the only way I knew how to communicate with them.
It always seemed as if there was a bottomless chasm between me and those others. I had no role in the community of the schoolyard or the playground. I only knew I didn't belong there, only felt comfortable in the company of the librarian and the old blind man who walked his dog at the park every morning. We would talk about books, swap stories.
The role I cobbled up for myself with my peers was as a sort of tumler, the comedians who haunted the fringes of shtetl society in eastern Europe of the 19th century. They were the fools, the jugglers, the storytellers, who were tolerated as long as they amused the crowds. I used to write stories and poems to order, and hand them around. That was what I did.
I have never gotten over the feeling that I am still playing that role.