If It's Important Enough, You'll Do It [Journal]
I’ve been telling myself that by the time I’m 30 I want a new set of problems.
I’d like to do it sooner, but I would settle for 30 to not wake up every day like I’m falling to pieces. To have more good days than bad days. To not feel like I keep failing people I love because of all the abusive shit in my heart that makes me so scared of abandonment. To have one of my most difficult problems to be what I should write for my next novel, or what I should do that day to make myself more happy, or what I can begin to build to have a more fulfilling life with the people that I love.
Over the course of the last several months, the ineffable monster inside of me has begun to slowly transform into something of a manageable problem. Not an inevitability, not a wellspring of sadness gushing out of the inside of my stomach. But a problem, like anything else.
To change the course of a life with mechanisms built so tight - with sadness like a desert - is one of the most difficult things I think a person can do. But I know it’s possible.
I’ve had days now where I’ve felt the weight of -her- like a dead cicada shell. And I’ve felt happiness, because I could see the substantiality and the reality of the things that were built around. It wasn’t an illusion, and it wasn’t a trick. It was real.
I can feel her now. She’s blinking a little on my right shoulder, with heavy breath and frozen teeth. She tells me, “I’ll take everything you love until you learn to love losing.”
It has to be possible. Because I have things I don’t want to lose now. And I have gotten very close to losing them. And what is the fucking point of being alive, of trying to build a life, if everything that you ever wanted, everything that you ever built, every scrap of happiness or warmth, is destroyed right in front of your eyes.
Not by fate. Not by luck. But by your own hands.
That’s the worst part. There is no consolation that things were just “not meant to be”, or “you’ll do better next time.” or “That guy was a jerk anyway.” There’s no consolation for someone like me that the hands of fate are going to land me somewhere better, or that it’s all collapsing around me because it wasn’t built to be sustainable anyway.
It’s because I was terrified of being abandoned, and I was scared of being unloved, and so I stuck my hands deep into something beautiful and tried to tear its fucking heart out.
People like me with that kind of attitude don’t get fucking tea and cookies and condolences when they screw up. People like me either get killed or outcast or go to fucking jail. Because there’s no goddamn excuse for being so horrible, no matter what kind of heavy, impossible pain you carry.
It’s not acceptable to me anymore to be unhappy. It’s not acceptable to me anymore to keep tearing the hearts out of lambs and dogs and uprooting trees so I won’t have to accept their sudden loss. I’m never going to be God. I’m never going to predict the trajectory of the movement of the universe. I can’t mitigate loss. But I can stop myself from being the thing that always makes me lose.
People keep telling me that writers are supposed to be sad. That misery is the only way to create good art. But that is the most fucking unacceptable, lazy attitude I have ever heard in my life. Not only it is untrue, it is a tacit acceptance of sitting in front of a midnight ocean wave because you feel like you can’t stand up and get off the beach. It is a refusal to even look at the problem that brought you to that moment.
I keep thinking of how difficult it is to write. Not difficult in the sense that I just need to put brute force into. To get it right requires skill and finesse - it requires knowing what to do at each moment, knowing the language and the context - no amount of ramming your head against a wall and “trying” to get it right next time is going to produce a great novel.
It starts with seeing. And in the middle is work. And the seeing, and the context, and the work, never really ends. Not if you want to be great.
So it is the same with being happy. With taking care of things that you love. And if it’s important enough to you, you’ll do it.
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I fully relate. Things have been rough lately, and its no ones fault but my own. I hope things get better for both of us.
Me too. Thank you @sunravelme.
Great post! From what I have noticed though - motivation is the key for many things in life and it's what determines our course of living.
Yes, definitely. I just think if the motivation isn't there then you've determined that it isn't a priority for your life. And if you think it should be a priority it's important to realize why it's not and why you're not taking the steps to achieve it - maybe fear of failure is more important, maybe you're too tired, etc. Once we can categorize and understand how we look at our goals, it's easier to rearrange priorities.
Anything that can change, with determination, will.
That voice that tells you 'I can't do X' is just a manifestation of fear. I feel like I have read this before somewhere?
It's important to recognize the fear for what it is, I think, and that with the right amount of knowledge and will we can overcome.
This is actually from my journal - I don't think I've posted it anywhere online before but I'm sure the concepts have been written about before in some form.
Fear certainly is a dangerous beast, it can creep up on you unexpectedly. Not that it can't be tamed.
Hmm, I think I must have confused this with my own writing somehow.
I feel like I would like to comment with something intelligent and helpful. But instead I'll just say I read this carefully and thoughtfully, and I can relate some of it to my own life. Thanks for sharing your journal entry and I wish you all the best!
Thank you @kenny-crane! I'm glad you got something out of it.
Much appreciate for your thiis post.
You know what they say....the road to someday leads to the town of nowhere. JUST DO IT.....................
Who tells you this? Secretly sad people who wish they could be writing? Or stymied artists who think that embracing sadness could un-jam their creative blockages, as if the promise of creative redemption was meant to be compensation for their tears?
Yah, I'll take happy and well-paid and pubished over undiscovered genius any day.
Keep living and writing and smiling. We're here with you and we want to hear it.
I don't know. People are stupid. Even other successful writers seem to feel they can only tap into the sadness of them. If I tell people I'm depressed sometimes they'll just kind of shrug and say "Well, you're a writer." So many sins and vices can be forgiven because people don't really understand how art works.
And thank you @winstonalden. I'm glad to be in a welcoming space.
beautiful
greetings @snowmachine
Thank you for sharing this with us @snowmachine.
I can relate, having myself gone through rough times previously. Life is beautiful, but tough also. The beauty of it cannot be seen unless you work for it.
Writers are not suppose to be sad, they are who they are thanks to their own experiences. You are suppose to be you, full stop.
Much love. @frenchlondoner
I find if you find real purpose -( even if it's forced, to begin with,) makes everything else fall into place.
It's like a lens - it focuses-and disregards what was previously important - if it's not relative to your new purpose..