24 Apr Begin here.
Somewhere between the urge to continue and the force that pushes you to quit, there is me.
I have been writing and quitting, writing and quitting for so long that I can’t even remember when it started. More often than not, I quit—sometimes because life demanded something else from me and I couldn’t find the energy to continue, sometimes just because I thought there was no need for my blog to exist. With so many more interesting and smarter blog writers out there, what I have to say didn’t seem worth anybody’s time. Yes, that’s a weak excuse, but it really was what I thought. I also believed it wasn’t worth my own time, as I would never be able to produce high-quality content that would make a difference.
But here I am again. After a couple of rough months marked by big changes in my life, I am ready to commit again. Commit to writing and to curiosity. Commit to doing something meaningful every day, instead of doom scrolling and snacking. (I wanted to add “pitying myself,” but fortunately I quit that before I started writing this post.)
It feels like my perfectionism is blocking me from doing anything. I often find myself thinking about writing something, but then I refrain because I think it’s not worth it—it will never be good enough. But what does that even mean?
So here’s to the fear of not being good enough: “Fuck it.” One evening I was a little drunk and tired of myself, and I thought about how I am always moving inside a box created by other people’s ideas and how they limit me. I won’t dive too deep into that, but you all know what I mean. It’s the questions you have when someone presents reality in a certain way or tells you that things are so and so, and you immediately ask: Why? Who said this? I mean, of course there are laws and rules, but so often we limit ourselves in our thinking, for whatever reasons, and that makes us dull and cynical. In my drunken state of mind, I just had enough of that.
“Everything is invented,” I texted to a friend and laughed at myself, standing there smoking in the rain. “We live in invented concepts and ideas that are so comfortable and familiar that we don’t dare to think something else.”
A couple of days later, I was ready to start something new.
Here’s what I thought: If everything is invented, I might as well invent my own rules. And what better way to set the rules than to see life as a series of experiments in which I can find out what works and what doesn’t? Instead of being cynical, self-pitying, or blaming, how about being open and curious, and also intentional about finding out what my truth is? There will never be a better time, there will never be a better me. So it begins here.
Every week I will design an experiment that will affect an aspect of my life and will report here. It won’t be about making new or better habits or getting rid of old and bad ones. It will be about trying things out and seeing what happens.
I hope you stay with me and maybe start your own curious journey and let me know all about it.
Photo credits: National Library of Medicine via unsplash.com