22 de Julio
[A Stream of Consciousness Essay.]
On Not Starting Over.
I woke up to my standard fare of thoughts. “Oh god, the sun is so bright out, how late is it? I’ve wasted my whole day. I must be so lazy.” How exhausting of a thought to have that be my first waking thought. All good, just good to know that those thoughts don’t serve me and that I’m working on how to change them. I still get this crazy FOMO every time I look out the window and see how hot and sunny it is here. I think about how much I want to be at the beach. But I don’t only want to be at the beach, I want to be at the beach with a whole bunch of hot and interesting people and then I start feeling sorry for myself, thinking about how “Oh I could never get that.” for some reason. Even though that exact situation happened two days ago and it was beautiful. We were all dancing in the moonlight and swimming until the sun came up.
I think the key here is repetition, to remind myself over and over again that not only am I doing OK, but I am doing great. I’m making sure I have the time to work on my passions while also trying to go out and be a part of the world, despite the fact that I have a proclivity to hole up, I keep going out, trying to grow a little bit each time, trying to change into the best version of myself. And I’m incredibly proud of that. It’s interesting, as I write this, I do believe it (and it’s definitely not as hard of a thing to write as it was yesterday) but it is still a little hard to write. I think that’s a good sign because maybe tomorrow it will be even less hard to be nice to myself.
That’s something really interesting I’m realizing is that for some reason we don’t want to be nice to ourselves. We’re afraid of it, and I don’t know why. We don’t want to say kind things to ourselves, we scoff at them, we say things like “That’s cheesy,” or “That’s Hippy Dippy”, and I’m no exception. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid of sounding inauthentic. And again, we remember that the answer to all of this is so simple. Just stop being inauthentic. You know what your insides are saying. It just takes being quiet. Even more than that, there really isn’t anything I can’t do, and I’m done giving so much credence to the word “can’t”. I’d like to put an alarm out in my head to catch that word every time I say it or even think it and to really scrutinize the emotion that is coming behind it.
If I think about the sentence:
“Humans can do almost anything they want”
from a logical, cold standpoint then I have no qualms with it. But if I think about how that sentence makes me feel then it’s a whole different story. First I feel excited and exhilarated, the feelings that rush into my mind are the same feeling I got while I was biking down that huge hill on the bike path past the cow farm at Santa Cruz. Freedom. Like I’m flying. I see myself in Morocco. I see myself in Latin America, I see myself dressed well, very clean and also very dirty scuba diving and biking through the jungle, I see myself working on charities and artistic communities throughout the world. I see myself actually feeling sexually, emotionally, and spiritually free. But I also feel so afraid, I start to feel very sad that I don’t have any of that yet, almost betrayed but by whom I don’t know. Maybe it’s just myself, like I let myself down. After that, I feel a deep sadness that makes me want to console myself by rolling back into bed and snuggling myself.
But we’ve learned about what that is. That is resistance. Resistance is the pain you feel from the distance between your current life and your potential life, and that pain can freeze you in your tracks. That’s why they call it the War of Art, because you really do need to go to war against resistance. So I guess the benefit of this essay today would be to realize what my resistance looks like and you might be able to realize what form it takes for you.
Mine is at times very sneaky, at other times it’s violent and loud. But it is never very creative. It’s the same four or five insecurities played out in different ways over and over again:
1. You are not valuable…
2. You are lonely…
3. You are not talented …
4. It is too late…
5. Give up…
That’s basically all they boil down to, and there are myriad proofs I have against all of them but I think the simplest ones are these”
Yes I am.
No I’m not
Yes I am
No it’s not
No.
No trying to offer evidence or proofs or conjure up stories. I don’t need to prove these things to anyone. They’re just true. I am talented, surrounded by wonderful people, I do good and difficult creative work, Now is the perfect time, and I simply do not give up. I’m not that kind of person.
The reason I titled this essay “On Not Starting Over” is because I think I have the tendency to think that I need to. I think I always need to start back at square one to reinvent myself and I forget all the data I’ve worked up so far. I’m done with that. Right now I am not at the beginning, I am in the middle. The task now is to remember where I’ve started, how far I’ve come, and what I’ve learned along the way.
I think that continuing to do this every day will be incredibly helpful in tracking what I’ve learned. For some reason, I think I need to reinvent the wheel every time I’ve failed or something. I think instead it would be more useful to think of all of these little failures and Successes as “Iteration Cycles” and to keep more data on them and try not to make the same mistake twice.
What absolutely blows my fucking lid off (and this is why I’ve made writing my craft my art form and my lifestyle) is the power that words have over our lives. I see now why people would kill each other over philosophy. That’s what is also hilarious to me that my creative writing program did such a poor job in teaching me. That I didn’t start to realize this until I took this study into my own hands. Now it seems like most people who have had a measurable success have fixed the way that they talk to themselves. They have fixed their mindset. Their operating system. Their monkey mind.
Because I know for a fact that those words and fear about how the morning was wasted created the fact that I slept in. My fear was blocking my passion and the burning desire that I have for this. Soon, I was watching John Mayer Videos, imagining him at 19 working his ass off for this thing that he loved, probably going to as many shows as possible, burning the midnight oil, but I’m not using any of that to inspire myself, I’m using it to feel sorry for myself and to essentially masturbate with my sadness.
The people I admire (and the person I am becoming) say different things to themselves. They say more positive things to themselves and that affects their actions which changes the world. Knowing that makes what I’m doing now very urgent. Very fun, too. Because I know that I am rewiring the neural pathways in my brain, and that’s not easy but I’m doing it because I’m a badass motherfucker, motherfucker.
