It’s 9:45 PM on a Saturday evening and my body hurts a lot. The only thing I want right now is to lie down and fall asleep.
Well, that’s not true. What I want is to pull my left shoulder blade out of my back with a primal scream, throw it on the ground, and yell obscure occult chants for attention. I want to squeeze into a straitjacket made for a much younger me and have it corset my torso from one side to the other. I want my vision to darken around bloodshot eyes and for the ground to rush up to my face as I pass out into sweet comatose stupefaction, with the morbid hope that if I do have to wake up, then I wake up without this pain.
I will settle for Tiramisu ice cream instead.
That’s because, dear reader, I have in fact chosen to inflict this pain upon myself with reckless abandon and wanton fortitude. I’ve been working out a lot.
Hello amorphous-but-all-powerful reader, how are you? It’s been a while. Thank you for gracing me with your attention and thus granting me existence.
The last time I spoke to you, I mentioned that Imma write a book.
That was 7 months ago. Where are we now?
- Well I continued writing that story, and got to about 12000 words.
- But then the Fire Nation attacked. By which I mean I suddenly began to get a ton of job interviews and I had the privilege of choosing which company to join. I joined a new workplace on April 1st.¹
- I stopped writing my book while I got used to the new job. It has been and continues to be a lot of fun. I pulled back on my D&D / RPG games as well.
- Meanwhile, I got diagnosed with ADHD.²
- Then in July, I hit burnout in record time. Absolutely Guinness Book stuff. Way to go, me. I put too much focus on work, too little focus on health, hobbies, and even remembering to eat meals.
- So then, at the behest of my therapist and after careful deliberation, I made the very brave decision to stop being an idiot. I cut back on work just a skosh and started working out again.
- Discovered I had lost a lot of strength.³ But I got back into the swing of it and I’m already back up most of the way. It’s amazing how quickly you can recover lost strength once you restart.
That last bit is what has now led me to want to recover my strength in non-technical writing again — for RPGs, blog, and fiction. That is why I forced myself to run an RPG last Sunday, which went well, and why I’m actively planning new games. That is why I’ve started plotting a new short story as a way of snaking my way back into writing the book⁴.
And that is why, on this Saturday night, with my back absolutely killing me, I’m writing this for you.
I am always amazed when people tell me they can’t do something. It’s a fascinating thing, and they always have multiple reasons. It’s always backed by great logic and carefully weighed opportunity costs and SWOT analyses put together on beautifully designed Powerpoint slides⁵.
No wait, that’s not it. It’s usually either fear, guilt, or self-hatred.
And while I’ve developed a lot of patience⁶, I do not have the patience to allow myself the luxuries of that fear, guilt, or self-hatred.
I want to do things, man. And I want to do them now and then and forever again. I want to ride lightning and shit fire. I want to swallow the sun and get wet in the rain. I want to write my goddamn book. And so I am doing all of it.
It doesn’t matter how quickly I wrote 12000 words in Q1. It doesn’t matter that I stopped for the last few months. It DOES. NOT. MATTER. that I feel impostor syndrome and “oh god I’m such a shit writer nobody will read this what do I do”.
What matters is picking up where I left off and seeing it through.
Because ultimately, you cannot live in what-ifs and should-haves and ever expect to be happy. While you allow yourself to be haunted by your past or frantic about your future, the present is passing you by, and your what-ifs never come to life, and your should-haves continue to grow. Your specters will haunt you every step of the way, right up until the last one you take to banana peel yourself into your grave. It’s a terrible way to live.
Indecision is a decision, because time marches on regardless.
You must live and do things in the present. These are the pains we give ourselves — don’t shy away from them. Because these pains give us the strength, the motivation, and frankly the audacity to carry hope and desire in our hearts.
The pains that we give ourselves are the stairs that deliver us to our aspirations.
Footnotes
[1] Shockingly, they didn’t reveal that it was a prank.
[2] Very validating, very relieving, very demure, very mindful. More on this in a future post.
[3] Like a lot… My PR for deadlifts in the past was 130 kg. When I started again this time around, I could barely pick up 60.
[4] For the book, I will probably shift the goalposts back down a couple of levels. It turns out that making things harder for yourself isn’t necessarily the most efficient path to completion. Hard to believe, I know.
[5] Yes, that’s an oxymoron. Slideshows and “beautifully designed” don’t go to the same school.
[6] Seriously, more than a few people have commented on how much calmer my general vibe is recently. Little do they know that I will forever choose to be a wizard gremlin.
