This is what it looks like, guys and gals, to be learning a craft. The struggling, the self doubt, the breakthroughs, the failure and the triumph, and most of all the obsession.
I think about my writing every day. Most of the day. Even when I’m not thinking about it, it’s playing in the back of my mind. When that gets out of control, it’s exhausting. It wasn’t out of control today.
Tonight, though, I do find myself thinking about what exactly all of this blogging/journaling is really about…and it’s about witnessing to myself and to you the journey that I’m on, which is, I want to be a goddamn writer. A good one. And I write each night about where I’m at in that journey.
I suppose it feels rather far away tonight, and as though this documenting is a self-indulgent, self-important and deluded activity. Like, only failures would fail this much, would write this much about something they haven’t really figured out. That this very blog itself is a monument to my ineptitude.
It feels like that sometimes.
Other times, when I feel like I’ve made progress or actually produced something I’m proud of, this monument feels as though it’s one to the truth of just how much angst and effort it takes sometimes to reach a summit.
I worry that I write this blog for a false sense of accomplishment, false in that it makes me put myself in the best light and often sound like I have things figured out—and sometimes I do have them figured out…but there’s always the slide backward to worry about and/or experience.
I read something a couple months back about how talking and acting as though a task/skill/breakthrough has already happened, celebrating it as though it has come to pass when it has not, can hurt our chances of ACTUALLY doing that thing—particularly when shared with others for congratulations, adulation and other positive feedback—because we’ve already received the anticipated psychological benefit of that task/skill/project/breakthrough. We skipped to the end, got the high, arrived, and now we don’t really even need to do it anymore. We so craved that positive successful place, we mentally went right there to the finish line, and then we don’t need to DO it anymore. But, it’s a trick, of course, because we’re not dummies. We know we didn’t actually do the thing, and that dissonance is toxic.
I don’t know how much science that’s based in, but I can tell you this: I’m realizing tonight it scared the shit out of me.
Is that what I’m doing with this blog? Am I skipping ahead to the end? Am I torpedoing myself?
Probably.
But, also probably not. I think it’s somewhere in between. It’s neither of the extremes, and sometimes it’s both of them. It really depends on how I’m feeling, I think.
When I let go and tell the truth, this blog serves me. It’s an accurate depiction of when I’m at.
And tonight…I’m a little rough, I guess.
I don’t want to skip to the end. I want the real thing.
I want the truth.