Sunday, 5th May, 2024

Having a hard week, and taking my own advice.

I really did not want to write this week.

It was one of those weeks where every time I sat down to try and write something, I would feel an overwhelming inertia, almost like the blood in my body had turned into concrete.

The way I write this newsletter is that I'm usually compiling snippets of ideas—bits that come to mind or experiences I find myself reflecting on—and after every newsletter gets published, I go back to this list and see what resonates. Sometimes, something completely new comes up, and I go with that instead.

None of that worked this week. Staring at my list, I felt bored and disconnected. I previously said that writing this newsletter is my way of working on myself, but what no one tells you is that working on yourself is exhausting. I get why people don't do it; I frequently still have days when I genuinely believe life would be so much easier if I just went back to being cynical and self-destructive.

But a major growth area that I've been working on has been to have more discipline, whether this is in sticking to routines or simply following through on what I've committed to doing.

So I thought I would force myself to do this anyway. I tried to take the advice I often give other writers: just write what's in front of you. Write what you can see, what you can hear, and what you can touch. Close the gap between your thoughts and your words. There is no one to impress, no goal to reach, no story to tell, and no truth to deliver. Just look, and describe.

What is that Rumi quote that gets thrown around a lot? Walk, and the path will appear.

Do that. Show up and hit publish, even if it is to say that I have nothing to say.

Look, it’s the abyss!

I've never had the best relationship with discipline. I have a theory about why, and it's that specific things came effortlessly to me when I was much younger. Academically, I wasn't the best at at math and the sciences, but I always did well in the arts, and particularly in subjects like Literature and General Paper. So while I wasn't necessarily smarter than other kids, I did always in some way feel like I was 'better' than them.

I was arrogant and complacent, and took for granted that I just needed to show up, be myself, and everything would work out. The shadow side of this was that I was often passive or indecisive. I would think that I didn't care, or that I was too good for something, when in reality I was just afraid of not getting the things I wanted to pursue.

As an adult, I now see how I developed these attitudes as defence mechanisms against specific events. But I'm also still dealing with the reverberations.

Sometimes, for instance, I will notice things in my life that I know I should take more seriously and put more effort into. Yet I would inadvertently begin to distance myself from any kind of action or resolution.

At the heart of it, I think, is my need to believe that it is enough to just be who I am in my most natural and unfiltered state.

But what I'm learning about discipline is that being yourself does not = doing nothing. Being yourself means being honest about what matters to you, and actively shaping your life so you can have those things.

Earlier this week, I got my 10th paid subscription to this newsletter. It's a milestone insofar as a single digit became a double digit, but I share this because switching on paid subscriptions was one of the few things in recent months that I was really, genuinely, terrified of doing. But I did it anyway.

I did it because I needed to understand what it means to balance both ends, to inherently believe in what I do, but also look externally to the world to give it a chance to tell me what my work is worth.

And so my thinking was: if I switch on paid subscriptions and people do pay for this newsletter, I will know that my work matters; if I switch it on and no one subscribes, I will survive it, because this is not what I need to know that my work matters. Both realities can coexist.

10 paid subscriptions is not a lot. For me, it amounts to an additional $800 in income this year.

But this week, seeing a new paid subscription was a reminder that this is what discipline has been about for me.

As I've continued on this path of being self-employed, I've tried things and seen results that I'm happy with. At the same time, I've started to feel like I should be experimenting more and getting clearer about how I want to shape and grow what I'm doing.

It's not so much that I'm feeling impatient and left behind, or that I don't trust the process. It's more that I don't think I'm giving the process enough material to work with.

I recently finished Travelers to Unimaginable Lands, a book about how dementia affects the lives of those who suffer from it, and those who care for them in turn.

I've since found myself coming back over and over again to this particular bit:

When communicating, we partially redress whatever chaos, unpredictability, and unruliness exist around us. All conversation is, in a sense, hopeful. By conversing, we create and acknowledge the possibility that clarity, meaning, and connection exist even when there appears to be only strangeness and futility.

In a similar way, the solution to feeling like I really didn't want to write this week was simply to write.

By doing and daring, we hope that life unfolds itself and that things happen. And I try to think of discipline and writing and life in the same way—that I have no right to expect any of this to be easy, but if I start, if I do something, I can perhaps make all of this a little less strange and a little less futile.

---