Every day of our lives, we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.
— Mignon McLaughlin
This year is about accepting that whatever it is I’m doing to become Mr. Author Man, I’m going to have to do it over and over and over and over—there’s no one true thing that, once inculcated as a habit by dutifully carrying it out for no less than 62 days, or whatever, now I’m a different person for my whole life.
Instead it’s just: try something, it doesn’t really work. Keep trying it, it works a little. Stop trying it because you got distracted, try something else. Keep trying it, it doesn’t really work. Keep trying it, it works a little.
This feels like a non-sustainable way to achieve a creative process, but… but… but… I’m not Stephen King, as self-described in On Writing. I’m not Chris Fox and I’m not Joanna Penn and it doesn’t matter. My life is the slow exploration of discovering what my life is. I hope that involves writing books instead of just wanting to, but in the same way that Stephen Pressfield talks about the professional not being married to their work—you just DO the work, and the outcome doesn’t matter, you just go do the next thing—I want to treat my whole life that way.
I might mess up my next intimate relationship in a way that’s only 20% different from how I messed up the last two; well, then I learn something new and move on. And ditto for trying to get a book written.
Last week or so, I’ve been better at getting to bed around 9-9:30 instead of 11. I finished binging The Wire and am trying to avoid picking up another TV show or video game, those being the easiest evening timesinks for me. My alarm is going off at 6:30, but I’m sleeping in ’til 7:30, which makes it hard to be ready to start writing at 8:30. But I can work on the sleeping-in thing.
I finally formulated little affirmations to say into the mirror in the morning and the evening and put them in a daily checklist in my phone—creating rituals, something I’ve meant to do for months and months, since I quit my previous rituals for no apparent reason.
And when I realize in a month or two that all of the above fell down, again, all I really want from myself is to sigh, smirk, sweep the cards back into a pile, shuffle the deck… and start the boring, tedious, frustrating labour of balancing their edges against each other again. And again. And again. And again.
You don’t need to earn your awakening, you just need to put both feet in and remember to wake up. Now. And now. And now.
— Jessica Graham