What Exactly Are You Afraid Of?

I’ve been talking to friends lately about why it’s so hard to share the difficult parts. That is, why it’s so much easier to write a blog post about some happy-smiley writing tips, but when I spend two or three weeks that turn into two or three months not working on my novel, I go radio-silent, too.

Part One is it doesn’t seem like there’s anything worth saying. Does it help for me to share the things I’m struggling with? Aren’t we all struggling with things, and who am I to project my lot into the world, as though strangers on the internet give a fuck?

Part Two is the opposite, and equally unthinkable: if I project my weaknesses, if i reveal my soft underbelly, won’t I be found wanting? Especially in comparison to my heroes. You know the ones, the people who are doing the thing I want to be doing. We don’t even have to go lofty like Stephen King or Hemingway—that would be too obvious. Even Chris Fox.

I mean, Chris has talked about depression, and I appreciated that. But like everyone he mostly talks about his successes, and your brain gravitates to those and forgets about the failures he shared, and pretty soon the only failures you think about are your own, and why would you want to share those?

Then again, why not? Maybe they help one other person. Just one. Maybe the whole world rejects you, and more likely no one even notices you exist, but there’s just one person who sees this frustrated blog post, this admission that I’m flailing my arms in open air and I haven’t a fucking clue where I’m going to land, and they go, Thank Christ—because I feel the same way, and I thought I was the only one.

That might be a stupid story I tell myself as I spill my guts all over the floor, there to be humiliated or annihilated (which is worse?) But maybe it isn’t. And, most likely of all… it doesn’t even matter.

And if it doesn’t matter you might as well do it.

That’s Part Three.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently about the human condition. I summed it up like this, because I was a beer in and just in that kind of mood:

You are an accident that will soon be corrected.

From the perspective of the universe, I mean. I’m not trying to be an asshole.

But, think about it: In a hundred years, the likelihood is that no one alive will know you even existed. In two hundred years, that’s just about a certainty.

You can either think about things like this and hang your head and stare at the floor or you can take heart in the understanding that your life is not so epic and important that you must be paralyzed by shocking panic fear whenever you conceive of creating anything.

Instead, you can just create the thing, because

a) it doesn’t matter whether you do or not, and

b) you’re driven to, regardless

My witticism about you being an accident was in response to my friend saying that entropy always wins. In the end, all human effort is futile.

I chewed on all this for a few days, and then a thought struck me as I was walking down the street: Sure, entropy always wins, but humans seem driven to create order from chaos even though we know it’s futile.

That being the case, you might as well create order out of chaos, because what’s the alternative? You’re wired how you’re wired. Entropy wins anyway, you’re driven to create, so… create.

Looking at it this way, there’s literally nothing better you could do with your time.

I want to apologize for these morbid ways of picturing our lot in life, but frankly I don’t find them morbid—in the sense of being depressing—they help me out. Because when I get heavy, the heaviness almost always seems to come from being too attached to my identity.

To worrying about what everyone else will think about me.

To being “found out”, never mind as what.

Something deep in my brain believes with religious fervour if I am found to be flawed, if I disappoint, if I am not enough… then I will be flung into empty space, there to drift and die an infinity of deaths. In the cold, all alone.

That’s ridiculous. Not to mention melodramatic. If someone doesn’t like me, I guess they could shoot me in the face, and that’d suck. But what’s far more likely is… nothing. Maybe someone says something unkind to me on the internet? Or in real life?

Compared to the inevitability of entropy, doesn’t that seem like a stupid thing to worry about?

Maybe this is too Zen for you, I don’t know. And now I’m probably misrepresenting what Zen is, for that matter.

Worry, worry, worry. Or I could just hit Publish.

And then, at least, I will have made something. And then I’ll have imposed a little order, in the littlest way, for a little, little while.

You might say: nothing matters, so what’s the point? But instead you could say: nothing matters, so what do you really have to be afraid of?

I’m afraid it will somehow harm me if I share the struggle. The bad stuff.

The just-not-giving-a-shit about the thing I keep saying and thinking I care so much about.

The way I just want to sleep in at the beginning of the day and play Skyrim at the end, which doesn’t leave any time to work on my draft.

The relationships I get into and then (I convince myself) they take all my time and attention, and then they end and my time and attention goes into medicating away the bad feelings with the aforementioned sleeping in and video games.

See? Does telling you that help? I have no idea. Does it hurt?

Not as much as I was afraid it would.