@tokenizedhuman
Firstly, happy birthday mate. Secondly, this is a good piece, well done. I'm going to have to check out your other fiction work too by the way, I love the poetry I've read of yours, so I'm interested in reading your short stories as well.
The visibility issue resonates with me, never easy to get work seen, harder still to make any money from it. Repeated issues for me too.
But hardest of all perhaps, is giving up.
A writer writes, whether they likes it or not. They just simple cannot.