On fear & hamsters

I’ve always been good at starting things, and the older I get, the less I take this for granted. I’ve been known to strike up conversations with strangers, pick up hobbies, switch jobs, pull friendships out of thin air, move into a van, and dive into intense home improvement projects with little preparation. I tell myself to just go, and then I go. Usually, the habit of suddenly shifting myself out of neutral ends well. (Most things in life are lower stakes than we’re led to believe.) However, like many people who are chronic starters, I’m often a poor finisher, and there is no part of my life that has suffered from this more than my writing. 

When I write something good, I feel euphoric for roughly six hours. It’s a longer, headier version of runner’s high. My first memory of this sensation is from first grade, when I wrote the true account of our class losing our pet hamster, Lucky. (The harrowing story ended with us finding Lucky in an adjoining classroom.) A few days after turning in the assignment, the teacher printed my essay on to a clear plastic sheet, which she placed on the projector and read aloud to the class. My words were six inches tall and bathed in yellow light on the screen, and I hadn’t thought they were special, but there they were, and afterward another kid complimented my story, and I realized that I liked the story too. I had written something good–something worth sharing, even–and when we lined up to go to lunch, I floated to the cafeteria.

You’d think I’d chase that high a little faster. Work a little harder to float on a daily basis, to feel at peace with my brain and my heart and the world. However, as someone who–in the years since first grade–has dedicated a lot of time to writing, I have a few mental hurdles that get in the way:

1. That euphoric feeling doesn’t come if I sit down and write crap, which happens a lot. When it happens several times in a row, it’s hard to not think, I’m losing it, losing it forever–which is utterly terrifying and a pretty good deterrent from starting altogether. (I realize this goes against my initial claim that I’m good at starting things. I think what makes starting a piece of writing different is that I usually don’t know what I’m beginning. If I paint a room, I pick out a color and have a mental image of what it should look like. When I sit down to write, I stare at a white page that can become anything in existence. It’s all very dramatic.)
2. The initial writing process, known as the “shitty first draft,” is exactly that–a first step. If I write something I think is worth pursuing, I get that euphoric high, and then eventually I come down and take another look at it. Sometimes, I realize I need to take the poem/short story/essay down to the studs. Sometimes, I send it to a friend and they don’t draw the conclusions I was hoping for. Sometimes, I decide it was never good at all. The process of getting a piece of writing from existing to done (“done”) is daunting. So I take my foot off the gas.
3. The end result has to be perfect.

Of course, the fear of not doing something well, the resulting habit of not seeing that thing through, and the obscene standard of perfection are not what life is about. I’m not sure why humans exist, but I know it’s not to be afraid. I am thirty years old. I have a life to live. I feel most alive when I’m writing, and I feel even better when I share that writing with people.

So, I’ve decided to do that sharing here. If you scroll down, you’ll see the most recent post is from September 2021. It’s now December 2024. So much has happened in that gap, and I regret not writing about some of it on this blog. Writing for other people, ironically, makes me recount things more thoroughly and honestly. There’s an accountability–what really happened? how did I really feel?–that doesn’t occur when I’m scribbling my most immediate thoughts in a journal. 

I’ll publish here once a month, and the things I write will not be particularly polished or cohesive. One month might be about religion, the next might be about paint. There will probably not be many pictures, because adding pictures on this website makes me want to throw my laptop at a wall. If you choose to come here, you’ll find my attempt at loving a life I sometimes only like, and at teaching myself that nothing will ever be perfect–including me, everyone I know, and everything I’ll ever write or do–and that’s wonderful in its own way. 

I’m going to share one more motive for restarting this very tiny blog. If I’m lucky enough to live a long time, and if my memory starts to fade during that time, I want to be able to crack open this virtual wooden chest and watch my thirty-year-old self think. I want a fairly consistent, technologically-backed-up account of the world I’m in. My future self will have the gift of past play-by-play encounters with people and events and ideas. I want to show her–or maybe remind her–that we are a person who tries, who goes, who starts.