I’d forgotten what it’s like to consciously put myself through feelings of strong pain or discomfort. Not just in the sense of working hard but also in the sense of disappointing the wife and the manager.
The ‘working hard’ aspect itself is important. I hadn’t been caring about anything enough to push myself through it unless there were external deadlines and named individuals waiting to review my work on a 3:30 PM call on Monday.
There was nothing that would make me want to put off sleep. Except reddit, LinkedIn and so on - which wasn’t me intentionally putting off sleep. That was (and is.) a kind of depravity I would want to walk away from.
Now there might be other kind of depravities I end up walking towards as I keep turning back and keep congratulating myself for having walked Oh so far away from reddit. It’s a real risk I run, not seeing where I’m going and falling flush into the arms of a new kind of depravity.
Back to the point. So there I am, cruising through life. ‘Prioritising sleep’. Along comes Oliver and here I am. Writing at 11:40 in the night because I want to make time for the things I like. Even if it means staying up late. It’s the right kind of thing to stay up late for.
There’s another, arguably more important realisation that has finally made its way through my skull because someone else said it.
I ain’t no Tolstoy, lieutenant Dan.
I may have a spark of creativity here, a flourish of the language there. I may even end up being half good. There’s that hope.
But there’s pretty much almost zero promise that I’ll ever amount to anything meaningful only for my writing (I’d like to, for now, keep the off chance that I get famous for something else).
Because of this, the self-imposed obligation to write brilliantly vanishes and what remains is a desire to write and the permission to write uglily.
On another note, since I figured out that what I’d been lacking in life is that I have been stoutly avoiding ‘putting myself out there’. Intellectualisation is the escape of the academically inclined meek. I also figured out, while running today, a potential remedy.
I’m allowed to dream. I’m allowed to think of empires and eons. There’s just one constraint. There must always been 5 things I can do immediately (within the week), 3 things I can do in 2 weeks, and 1 thing I can do in a month (working numbers for now). Unless there’s this, and unless I do this, I’m not allowed to pursue the idea further. As an afterthought, I’m adding that these things can’t be ‘research’ or equivalent.
They must have a possibility of failure (that’s easy to measure over a relatively short time frame). The failure must reflect against me, preferably in a public setting.