On Starting

There is only so much that can be done before you begin to think you might be broken.

Why can’t you start what you wish you had so long ago? Is it so hard to simply begin?

I have been sitting, waiting, watching the world do all the things I said I would do. What is stopping you from doing the same as all those people?

From a very young age I wanted to do everything. Everything there was to do. I made lists all of the things I wanted to do, long lists that trailed off into talk of building treehouses and forming companies and visiting every country. I was deeply afraid of missing out on each and every experience known to us. It was this fear that drove the impulse to turn every rock. For a while it worked, and thus I traveled the cosmos looking for rocks. I was a professional rock lifter, yet I found without a heavy modification to my method no one would pay for this profession. I wanted there to be a way to be constantly learning, always growing, and for that to be sustainable. I have yet to find a way to do that.

Our first issue is identified: I could not choose a “thing” to do. The anxiety of those kinds of decisions still hurt me, and I have spent years trying to prune, trying to widdle down my wishes to make things easier.

There is more to the inaction, however. I have a curse, in which I do not trust myself, and as such I do not know when something is done. To finish is to make a compromise, in faith, that what you wish to show the world will come through and be valuable without more work, that what you have here and now will be enough to make people feel something. I can rarely make that determination.

Thirdly, but never finally, I am afraid of the grand performance of life. I cannot “do”, which is the step that you must take to create. I have another plaque, one wherein I do not like myself, and as such do not have the confidence to know that what comes from myself will be good; with enough effort, with enough focus. Instead I often sit at the starting line, looking out at all the others running so much faster than me, with more grace, thinking to myself there is no way for me to be like that. I am not one of them, one of the proper ones.

To start is to fail, and I am so deeply afraid to fail.

And so it is a great trick that I got my mind to start writing.

In this place I want to put something I have never put anywhere but in my own mind. I want the thoughts that I didn’t deem worthy to be here, for everyone. No hiding anymore, another form of fear. I hope my honesty is a virtue. What can I offer but exactly what is here? I have no desire to pretend I am a paragon of anything anymore. Archetypes are beings of stories, for they are inhuman by nature. I am not one.

I hope you can learn something from me, broken as I am. There is hope yet I can be of some use among a sea of a million others.

Despite everything, I might be alright doing something with this life.

Starting now.