ME: Type. Delete. Type. Delete. Ugh…
RESISTANCE: It’s been over an hour now, mate. It’s not happening today. Why don’t you just give up? Nobody’s going to care. Write two pieces tomorrow. You’ll be in a better place tomorrow. You’ve got nothing to say today. I’m only thinking of you, mate…
ME: Fuck off.
The constant conversation in my head
I write and publish something every day and have done so for almost three months now. And on days like today, I curse the Oliver from three months ago who decided to commit to this habit, and who – in his infinite wisdom – signed us up to a habit-tracking service, where we have to pay money if we don’t keep our commitment!
What a dick!
No, he’s not a dick. It turns out he was a wise man. Truthfully, I’m very grateful he did those things.
It’s just that sometimes it comes easy and I can barely keep my fingers off the keys and I have so much inside me I want to impart to you and seemingly the only thing stopping me is the other obligations in my life…
… but more often than that come days like today.
I look inside myself, and I find that I am empty. There is nothing on which to feed myself, let alone to impart to others. Well, that’s not exactly true. I can sense that there are volumes inside me, pieces that in more capable hands could be translated into works of art. It’s just that they are written in a language that on days like this I have forgotten how to speak.
And yet… I live for these days. The bad days. Where it’s all an ugly struggle and there’s no point in anything and I don’t remember why I committed myself in the first place. Why?
Because there’s no glory in only doing things when they’re easy. If nothing inside you is resisting what you seek to do, you are conquering nothing. But if you can summon the will to try when every molecule conspires to make you give up, you’ve done it. You’ve found the secret.
Don’t you see? It’s not about whether I write anything good. I don’t care if I never write anything worthy of being read again. Ever. I don’t care if nobody is helped by what I write. Or amused. Or if I’m later embarrassed by something I published. Or if I offend the wrong persons’s sensibilities. Or if I annoy you like a barnacle in your inbox. Or if I somehow become a laughing stock…
None of that matters. There is only one thing that matters, and that is keeping up the effort, and the harder it is to keep up the effort, the greater the reward there is for doing so.
Whatever it is inside you that seeks to stop you becoming who you were meant to be, I don’t believe it can be destroyed. And even if it could, I don’t believe that it would help. It exists to help you grow.
So stand up to it. Tell it in no uncertain terms that no matter what it says and no matter how persistently it says it, you are not going to be stopped. Use its opposition as fuel. Make it make you better.