For the second year in a row, I find myself part way through February1 having intended, planned, and then failed to write a blog post about the start of the new year.
Last year, this kind of snowballed; I had a number of things I wanted to write about, and some that I even started to write about, but other things kept coming up, and the weight of having left this blog alone for so long certainly didn’t help. This year I intend? want? hope? to do better.
Intent, of course, doesn’t really mean shit.
Actually doing things tends to be kind of a narrow path for me, with sharp edges and slippery slopes all around. If I can manage to build a habit then sticking to it works okay, but habits without any kind of external structure to support them are easily broken, and once broken it becomes so much harder to start again. Worse, a lot of the drive behind keeping those habits is reliant on a fragile sort of standard; slip ups I can manage, but even the slightest moment of concession, of admitting defeat, is a very short path down a very deep hole.
Earlier this year I got challenged to write something by the end of January. I was doing pretty well, but some things came up on the last day of the month so I ended up a couple of hundred words short; not to worry, I said, it’s not a serious deadline, this is a game with a friend, I’ll finish it over the weekend. But that was conceding, and I didn’t manage to get those last few words out until mid-March.
This was not isolated. Every attempt I’ve made to get into doing regular physical exercise dies the moment I miss a day. I’ve failed entire Uni subjects because I didn’t quite get the first assignment done on time, and the moment the clock ticked over into “overdue, grade capped at 75% and falling” I just lost any drive to keep working on it; and, of course, once I’d gotten a No Submission on one assignment there was no way I was going to get myself to do the second, or the fifth. The fact that I managed to avoid “well if I’m failing one subject what’s the point of the others” is a blessing, and it didn’t even always work. I used to drive for 40 minutes to get to work by 9am every day; that burnt me out, I didn’t leave the house for three months, and now I can barely get into the office by lunch time most days even though the office is a much nicer environment this time. I had a writing project with some friends for years that went through this multiple times; the first time I failed to get a new post done on time also marked the last time I did post on time, and the moment I admitted that fact was the moment the project died entirely.2
This isn’t a post about lamenting my past or present failures. We’re moving on from that. I fall off of a lot of tightropes really easily when I stop moving. Cool. Big deal. This post is about figuring out how to get back on the tightrope afterwards.
I don’t really do new year resolutions much (and even if I did, this isn’t the post for it, that would have been the previous post I didn’t write), but my vague Thing at the moment is to keep commitments that I make to people, and to not make commitments that I can’t or won’t keep. Which feels obvious and nothing, but for a good while now I have said things like “I will” to mean “I intend to”, or “I will try to”, or “I will make an attempt to,” and that’s Bad. I think it’s honestly damaged some of my once-closest friendships. So the goal is to say the things I actually mean, and not say “I will” unless I believe with reasonable certainty that it’s actually true. This has been kind of freeing, in a way, and it’s helped a little with the resilience thing - not having made a Hard Commitment means I haven’t broken a Hard Commitment when I slip up, so the weight of that failure is less controlling when I come back for attempt two. It’s not much, but it’s something. What else?
A cool friend I’ve made recently3 has, in the last few days, hit one month on her own regular blogging, which is cool but also unthinkable to me; I could never keep up posting weekly, let alone daily the way she does. I’ve rewritten this paragraph several times trying to articulate any of my feelings about her writing, and have concluded that doing so here would either be insensitively reductive or vaguely inappropriate, so to keep on topic… I don’t know how she keeps it up. You know what? Fuck it. I can actually just go ask her.
oh emma you think too much
You know what? She’s absolutely right.
She was right about several other things as well, things I am going to think about longer, but the part that filters out as Relating to All This is that… yeah, I think too much. I get paralysed by the idea that the things I do should be perfect, and novel, and interesting, and without failing. I get paralysed by the secret commitments I make to myself without even trying or wanting to. Sometimes the grinding work to get the details right is worth it, but here? Not a chance. There is no reason a silly writing challenge a friend came up with on a saturday night should take three months to answer to. There is no reason this post should have taken more than a day, let alone over a month now. It’s barely even a thousand words! I think of you, the reader, as deserving content that is well written and interesting and presenting you with novel ideas in an intriguing fashion, but I don’t know how I even ended up writing for you in the first place. This is my blog post, and you are all welcome to it but if it’s not good enough then go read an actual book that someone edited.
When did I get so slow and measured and careful with everything? Was I always this way? I don’t remember. But it’s a cruel cycle - every action takes thought and consideration, so I take fewer actions, so each action has more weight, so the pressure for any given action to be good is greater, so every action needs to take more thought and consideration. But they don’t actually need that at all. You can Just Do Things. Climbing back onto a tightrope is tricky, but so what? You overbalance, you fall down, you’re back on the ground, you were here five seconds ago. You can try again and again and again.4 5
So I should learn to take smaller actions. Maybe starting with some smaller blog posts, for one. That sounds difficult, but if it doesn’t work, I can always just try again, right?
(now March) ↩
I will be continually cagey about what this actually was because despite it being Very Much Over there are details about it that I still feel… quite strongly about, evidently, and one of those is that the opinion that the facts of who was working on the project should not be available on the internet even if no one who that information should be hidden from will ever read this blog. ↩
Continuing my favourite bit of not naming anyone I write about ↩
Two footnotes here; the first is that, unfortunately, after recent events I have reason to believe I am somewhat chemically predisposed to struggling with actually doing this. I am not writing about that in this post because I am fighting the urge to explain away all of my problems as “oh that’s just because I have unmedicated ADHD”, and also because I probably shouldn’t write about the specific recent events in too much detail for Various Reasons. ↩
A specific bit that I wish I had thought of before I roughly determined the trajectory of this part is that I got to see a friend go bouldering for the first time recently, and they took to a specific climb surprisingly well; it started with running along a wall for a few steps, which I wouldn’t normally point a beginner at by any means, but they stuck at it for longer than most people would and as a result were, I think, the first person in our group to stick the landing on that manoeuvre. It was really cool to see. Please refer to footnote 3. ↩
