Chase the things that scare you
Unless you're scared of wild animals. Please don't chase wild animals.
I got out of bad reluctantly this morning.
I get out of bad reluctantly nearly every morning. I enjoy being in bed, going to bed, sleeping in bed, reading in bed. I love being cozy and there is no cozier experience for me than being in bed. Therefore, it is with great reluctance that I swing my legs over and stand up to begin my day, usually at the behest of my cat, who is yelling at me to get going already.1
I am not going to tell you every little detail about my morning routine. It's not interesting and I don't think I could make it interesting, so I'll skip ahead to the part that happened a little later: I sent my brother a text to wish him a happy birthday, and then I began writing my morning pages.2 I write them every morning, or near enough.
This morning, I was writing what was on my mind, which is that I have a heck of a time motivating myself to write or really do anything on Saturdays. I can waste entire weekends sitting on my couch, scrolling through the same five apps on my phone, because that's the next best thing to not doing anything at all. It's the only thing I can bring myself to do most Saturdays, and I have struggled mightily with this probably for my entire life.
Here's a flow chart:
get up, excited and motivated by the enormous possibilities of a day without work-related responsibilities
do my ablutions, quickly, so I can get to one of the many things I want to do that day
sit down in my living room with a cup of coffee and check my phone for any notifications that happened overnight, still brimming with excitement of the day's possibilities
put my phone down and write my morning pages
close the notebook I'm writing in after writing the prescribed three pages, and then pick my phone up again
the phone stays in my hand until the evening. I might get up and putter around or do a few housework things, but nothing very significant. I don't even watch tv or movies or anything at all.
Get mad and sad and angry at myself for wasting a perfectly good Saturday, and then lament all the Saturdays I wasted on this when I could have been working on one of my many projects. Concoct a few ideas to get me motivated, follow through with none of them.
This is unsustainable yet I have been able to sustain it for quite some time.
Here's Where I Tie It Back to My Brother
You know how I said I sent my brother a happy birthday text? It's true! I did! I sent it to him and then wrote my morning pages, and then I felt the creep of the bad feelings I talked about, above, because here it was a Saturday and I had my phone in my hand and, well, I just told you what was about to happen. Except it didn't! I started writing down this newsletter. I'll get to some of the other things that occurred to me but the one that has to do with my brother is this: he inspired me!
See, Rob wrote his newsletter and sent it out this morning and he described the exact problem I described with my Saturdays. I'm going to quote him here:
"I spent a night alone in my house recently. Two members of our family were spending the night with a girl scout troop. Another spent the night with her grandmother. That left me alone in the house for the first night, I think, since we moved in seven years ago.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried to do everything. I couldn’t sit still for more than twenty minutes at a time."
See!! Rob wrote about exactly what I had written about in my morning pages, and then wrote just now in this newsletter! He and I had the same experience. I even know what to call it: decision paralysis.
Do You Suffer From Decision Paralysis?
There's so much to do that I don't know what to do so I end up doing nothing at all. I do this every weekend. Maybe you do it sometimes, too! I think it happens to everybody, once in a while.
The thing is, Rob inspires me all the time. He's a great writer and I admire his command of the craft. But in addition to that, he's figured out something that I have always struggled with, which is finishing things and writing stories and getting them published. He's published books! He just had a story published that you can read.
Rob inspired me because I didn't know I needed to read my brother's experiences with the very same decision paralysis I was feeling until I read it. This is a theme in my life. I will ignore advice from a hundred people until I hear it the 101th time and then it clicks for some reason and I go oh yeah, that's right. I don't know why I do that but I do! I'm working on it!
Anyway, I know how to beat decision paralysis, and I knew that the fastest way to beating this particular decision paralysis was to do exactly what Rob does that I so often struggle with: just write the fucking thing.
I know Rob has other struggles with his writing. I suggest you read his newsletter and he can share his insights with you directly, and I won't try to speak for him here. But there's one thing that he consistently does that I need to emulate, and something that I've done before with no issue but kind of stopped doing for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me: he writes.
Writers Write
Writers write. That's all you have to do to be a writer. When somebody used to ask me for advice about writing (it used to happen!), that's the one piece of advice that applies to everybody all the time. If you want to be an artist, you have to make art. If you want to be a photographer, you have to take photographs.
It feels so simple, doesn't it? But it can be the hardest fucking thing you do in your entire life. I used to say I didn't like writing, but I like having written. That's a quote often attributed to Dorothy Parker but she didn't say that. She didn't write it, either. I thought she did until I looked it up.
But I actually do like writing. I love it! It's really fun to me to put words together until they make a whole sentence. I love collapsing all of my wild, wandering thoughts into one single stream of letters. It's therapeutic to me.
Here's the crucial bit: writing is its own end.
Don't Focus on the Deliverables
You didn't ask for writing advice, but I'm In a Mood and that mood is made for sharing my thoughts (it's my newsletter, after all, and you don't have to read it).3
Anyway, that's my advice. It's the same advice that Rick Rubin gives in this interview that made the rounds a while back and that I’ve written about before, but it bears repeating!
Work culture has this thing called a Deliverable. Work is all about making deliverables for other people. Sometimes it's obvious. If you are a baker, then the stuff you bake is a deliverable for your customers. The deliverable of, say, a writer, is a written piece.
How many writing careers have been strangled in the crib by the impossible, daunting idea of having to write an entire novel? They see the deliverable and they say "I can't do that! It's too much work!"
When you're just starting out, you have zeal. You haven't encountered any obstacles. Every idea you have is new and great and nobody's ever done them before. You can hitch yourself to that rocket and ride it all the way to a long, illustrious career.
But if you let the obstacles pile up, as I have, suddenly there's just a big mountain of excuses in front of you and you stop trying. You stop writing. How many middle-aged writers have stopped writing because that mountain stopped them, too? Am I going to be one of those writers? Maybe! I can't rule it out. I haven't published a single bit of creative writing in many years, so if I continue like this then it will be me, too!
But I don't want to do that. I want to write and share the stuff I write. I'm full of reasons and excuses for not having written, but any examination scatters them and they're nothing but smudge on my glasses. They aren't obstacles, they're illusions.
All the obstacles I have are created by me, in my head, and not imposed by anybody. There is so much great power in that one little conclusion that it staggers me.
I'm a little less cynical than I used to be. I also believe in certain specific kinds of magic, the kinds that reveal a little bit about ourselves and our lives and how we move through the universe, the kinds of magic that are invisible to our materialist selves and sit right under the surface.
I have a lot of things to say about the magic I have let into my life. The longer I live, the more of it I see, and the cynical bastard I used to be (or maybe still am) wears down a little and the romantic dreamer underneath shines through.
I find this period of my life to be transformative and exciting. I'm rediscovering things I always knew but forgot about, trying new things I never would have considered, and sometimes just even letting myself believe in things I would have dismissed out of hand.
Luck is probability taken personally.
That's another quote that doesn't have a very clear origin. But it's a way of looking at the world that I shared for most of my life. And while I still find that scientific, rational perspective useful for many things, maybe it's just not enough anymore.
For no clear reason that I can communicate, I have entertained that there might, indeed, be something unknowable and beautiful and incredible that we can't see, and maybe the universe isn't a cold, hostile collision of probabilities. I won't give it a name, because it doesn't feel knowable.
What I mean to say is, I don't know that Rob and I writing about decision paralysis near simultaneously, without discussing it or talking about it at all, might be pure chance. If it is, I am choosing to take it personally.
I'm tempted to write a bunch of excuses and equivications about this discovery within myself, but I won't. I have spent a not insignifcant amount of my life thus far criticizing, either openly or just in my head, people who believe these sorts of things. How silly. How selfish. How misguided, to think that the universe cares about me.
I find it difficult to even write this. I want to delete it completely!
But I won't. I must chase the things that scare me.
Okay, that’s one more bit of advice: chase the things that scare you.
Here’s a photograph I took when I was in England. It’s just a street. But I felt something magical there, something just out of view, that spoke to me. I choose to believe in the magic of this moment, even if it’s just the brain tumor I had at the time (lol).
He's a funny little dude. He eats whenever he wants, so it's not that he wants me to feed him. He doesn't particularly want me to pet him. He just wants me to be up and about, like a furry alarm clock.
Morning pages are not my invention. I wrote about them previously, and lots of people do them. The purpose of the morning pages is to get you writing. It works for people of all different artistic fields. It was popularized in the Artist's Way, a book I've written about before.
I am generally wary of pop psychology and self help material, even though I read an awful lot of it. I guess it's more accurate to say I'm wary of believing any of it or practicing any of it, because it doesn't ring true for me, personally. Some things I find in those books do ring extremely true for me, though, which is why I keep going back to that particular patch of clover--sometimes I find a four leaf one and I put it whereever you're supposed to put four leaf clovers after you've found them (the metaphor kind of falls apart here).
Like all advice, when I say "you should do this" what I really mean is "I should do this" so remember that whenever somebody gives you advice. They're talking to themselves just as much as they're talking to you, and the advice somebody gives can be a little glimpse of their interiority.
Ughhhh the mountain has stopped me and I hate it. The *thought* of writing again has me feeling all sorts of giddy and inspired and and... but then I just CAN'T DO IT.