Hey there
Getting back into the flow again after a long vacation in December and it feels incredibly good to be back. Big takeaways from the last month or so have been:
Solo gaming just totally kills me
Gaming with my friends as a way to have fun together and stay in touch makes perfect sense. I love that. But gaming by myself, diving into that pure escape from reality, with all its challenge and progression, that’s my drug man. It’s way too powerful. It makes me want to do that all the time. And it makes everything else less enjoyable. Like it turns the volume down on life. That’s a dangerous road. Moreover, it asks for hidden sacrifices. It isolates me because I prioritize that experience over connection. It makes me less creative because I’m living inside of someone else’s world instead of making my own.
It’s funny to think that the main addiction I would be battling in my life would be something so mundane and so culturally accepted. For a lot of folks, gaming doesn’t seem to be a problem at all. But it is for me. And that’s the thing I’ve got to accept. This is who I am. This is my battle. And it’s either I continue with this path and keep getting the same results I have been getting, or I choose something else and see what happens. I’ve decided to try something else and let solo gaming go this year.
Writing (for me) is going to war
I used to have a lot of ideas about what it meant to write a novel. What the process is like. What I can say is that, for me, it’s a battle through hell. And in a strange kind of way, I really like that.
For a great deal of my life, I’ve experienced a significant level of self-doubt in almost everything I do. I think a lot of this is just in my nature, a genetic inheritance. But there are likely significant environmental factors too. Mostly from when I was younger. Regardless, all of that is what it is and I cannot change it. What I can do is work with my nature and my tendencies as they are. And for me, writing a novel requires facing down a monster about the size of a dragon who whispers to me all the ways I am incompetent and unworthy.
This is the subtle monster inside which attempts to turn me toward videogames and other distractions so I do not have to face the real questions of my self-worth. Because that is what all of this is about, ultimately. I am creating a work that contains some of my own soul. And it will, inevitably, not be as good as it could have been. It will be flawed and imperfect, just like me. I can expect nothing else.
Yet this is the act of opening that vulnerability up and sharing it with the world. I have spent so much of my life protecting myself from just this thing. To not show my real weaknesses and flaws. To protect myself above all. Yet, here I am, trying to do something that unmasks me utterly. That puts me on dangerous ground on purpose. To choose to move toward what I fear instead of avoiding it.
I’m an avoider by nature, and this shit is hard. It is, by far, the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. But I am doing it. And part of me absolutely loves it.
Even if the thing I create is total trash, I will have walked a path of meaningful struggle to get there. I will be transformed in this. That is the point. That is the center of my work right now. Doing what I am afraid to do.
This helped me understand something else about myself, too
The Principle of the Adventurer
I must do hard things in order to feel good. I must face resistance. And the more I do this, the better I feel overall, long-term. The more I avoid what is difficult and drown myself in short term pleasures and distraction, the worse I feel overall, long-term.
It seems to be a kind of law at work within me. This law requires me to face significant resistance in order to generate feelings of contentment and accomplishment. Conversely, the more I bow to using distraction to take me away from what is difficult, the worse I feel long term.
Understanding this balance helps me put away the videogames more easily, and it also helps me pick up my (hypothetical) blade and go to war against those things I fear. Because the path to truly feeling good requires me to face what I would prefer to avoid, and look upon truth which will inevitably change me.
Standing up while I’m working is far easier than I expected, and feels excellent for my body
Seems like kind of a minor thing, but I’ve dealt with enough pain in my body to understand how significant something as small as a minor behavior shift can be. Toward the end of the year last year, I noticed my back and neck hurting more as I spent more time at my desk writing. Since writing aligns deeply with what I want to pursue, it caused some worry in me. Using a sit/standing desk platform has allowed me to shift my body up and down throughout the day and significantly reduced the amount of physical pain I feel from sitting at my desk too long.
Finished my Annual Reflection
This ended up going way longer than I expected. About 66 pages in total. But I found it was extremely helpful to go back and review, in depth, my journals from the past year and see what pattern came up over and over again. This helped me to identify the ways I wish to change in the coming year intelligently. Instead of simply going with what feels right in the moment to me, I could see across the landscape of the previous year and understand what I really dealt with and make better decisions.
I also updated my process for this and hopefully I can get the same result next year with about half the amount of writing.
Found my hype song
I read Josh Waitzkin’s book, “The Art of Learning” years ago which turned me onto the idea of having a hype song you tune into when you are getting yourself ready to face resistance, but I’d never found one that worked for me before. Well, now I got it. The Kill Bill edit of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” I love both the Kill Bill movies and this song helps power me up so I believe I can take on dragons.
Found the feeling I want to give the audience at the end of the novel I’m writing
This, in a way, feels like a small thing, but it’s incredibly significant. It gives me something to aim toward. To know if I’m achieving what I set out to achieve. It’s probably way too absurdly difficult, but what I want to give is the feeling of going through all kinds of hell, coming out the other side, and realizing that all us human beings are in this thing together. None of us are alone. And none of us have some perfect understanding of how to live well. We are all figuring this out together. And as he steps past a week that he’s repeated a hundred thousand times, we do the same into our own future. Every single week, we start anew. Not knowing what the future holds.
That feels pretty cringey as I write it here, but I do feel like being able to genuinely deliver on this feeling. Not trying to force your audience to feel it, but actually earning that feeling. That’s what I am aiming at.
So that’s where my mind has been the last couple of weeks. Getting back into this adventure and pushing hard at things that are difficult. It does feel like finding heaven in a kind of hell. But it’s a hell I get to choose. One that I own. One where I can find strength.