Tag: stream of consciousness

The Weekly Re-Motivator: On Not Belonging

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You can’t get there from here.

That thing you want to be? It’s an elite club. Elaborate membership initiation. Dizzying ivory tower across a raging, flood-fed river from where you are now. They actually get money to do the thing you’re trying to do for fun. They probably even have a secret handshake, and even if you made it across the river and climbed the tower, they wouldn’t teach it to you.

Italy, Pisa, Tower, Sky, Monuments, Buildings Italy

In short, you’re a pretender, and you will always be a pretender. You don’t belong there. This is impostor’s syndrome, and it’s a bitch. Impostor’s syndrome speaks with the voice that came pre-installed in your own head, which makes it particularly credible. And worse — it’s true! For the first (insert arbitrary period of time here), you will suck at the thing you’re trying to do.

(Here we talk about running and writing, since those are my two primary extracurricular jams.)

Those first runs suck worse than anything has ever sucked. You can’t even finish them, the best you can hope for is to do a little bit better than you did last time before your legs give out and you literally dissolve into a puddle of sweat on the pavement. You’re as graceful as an elephant on roller skates. You wheeze like a Chevy Malibu on its last legs (god help the designers of that car if I ever meet them in an alley).

Somewhere in the distance, you see the Ivory Tower of the real runners. Olympic Athletes, sure, but not even that — just people that run races for fun are in the tower. Marathoners. Half-marathoners. Even running a 5k seems a monumental and impossible goal at this point. And that voice kicks up in your head: you don’t belong, you’re not a real runner and you never will be, this is stupid, you’re stupid, stop trying!

Or writing. You set out to write a book or a story or a play or whatever, and maybe you start off okay, but soon the work turns into real, actual four-letter-word-WORK. The inspiration won’t come no matter how much you crank the engine (metaphors, whee!). The words that do come feel idiotic, stilted, hackneyed, or worst of all, just fargoing boring. You are the World’s Worst Writer, and it’s immediately obvious to anybody who reads your fetid pile of word-gerple.

And there, the Ivory Tower again. Real authors making real money with real readers, writing two or three or a dozen books a year, their books on the shelves at the mother-trucking Target, for god’s sake, so you can’t even pretend not to be aware of them while you’re buying TP and Chex Mix. Then the voice: your crap will never be on the shelves, just think of all the time you’re wasting, you don’t belong, you’re not a real writer, stop fooling yourself!

And maybe you believe it. Or maybe you don’t. Perception is reality, after all, and that Ivory Tower, metaphorical as it may be, exists in your mind, and all the barriers keeping you from it exist just the same. Hours, weeks, months, years of training and practice. A few lucky breaks along the way. Tenacity. Bull-headedness. Maybe even a little dash of crazy. Even if you’re doing the thing a little bit right now, it’s all pretend. You’re not a runner, you’re not a writer, you’re not THAT THING, whatever that thing is.

You’re just you, playing in the sand. Building up a joke of a castle and watching it wash away with each new wave.

Castle, Beach, Sea, Sand, Sand Sculpture, Artwork, Wave
You suck so bad.

But here’s the trick:

To build a castle, you actually need a bit of water. You can’t build anything without a healthy dose of the stuff that will bring it all tumbling down. And that Ivory Tower on the horizon?

It’s just a sand castle that somebody else built while they were feeling just as doubtful as you feel right now.

The trick is not to find the magic key to get into that Ivory Tower. You don’t have to guess the password, you don’t have to break yourself doing exactly what everybody else did to get there. The trick is to build your own Ivory Tower out of the sand, no matter how many times the ocean knocks it down for you, no matter how many times you wreck it yourself because you don’t know what the hockey-sticks you’re doing.

And it won’t be their Ivory Tower. You don’t have to belong to the super-secret, super-elite club, to be able to call yourself THAT THING THAT YOU WANT TO BE. It’ll be your Ivory Tower, where it’s okay to suck, where it’s okay to miss a day because you feel like puke run through a garbage disposal, where it’s okay to do something the completely wrong way and then turn around and re-do it the next day if what’s what it takes.

You build your own Ivory Tower.

Sand Sculpture, Structures Of Sand, Tales From Sand

And then you shine the beacon out to the other poor souls who think you did something magical to get there.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Nobody Would Blame You For Sitting This One Out

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The first “official” day of summer just passed, and it feels like it. This morning I had one of those runs that lets you know summer is here to stay.

The sweltering heat, like a dragon peeking over your shoulder while checking your Facebook feed.

The oppressive humidity, like stepping out your front door into a Jello mold past its prime.

The stale, hot breeze, like walking through the exhaust cloud of a semi hauling boiled cabbage.

And all this at 5 o’clock in the morning, before the sun is up!

Firefighters, Training, Live, Fire, Heat, Waves
Actual footage from my run this morning. Not pictured: me, the charred husk just out of frame.

It was one of those runs that teaches you the value of a nice, long, cool drink of water. You get back to the house after five miles in heat like that, and you want nothing more than to jump in an ice bath and guzzle a few gallons straight from the kitchen sink.

And nobody would blame you for not running when the weather is like this. God invented air conditioning for a reason, right? Maybe it’ll cool off next week.

Still, the runner needs these runs. The weather is not always sixty-two degrees with patchy cloud cover and a cadre of angels following you around to blow cooling breezes up your butt. If that’s what you need in order to get outside, you’re dooming yourself to the couch with the rest of the schlubs who “take up running” for a few weeks in April. I see them twice every year — wheezing and puffing around the mall because they haven’t put in the work, they just sat around waiting for the perfect conditions so they could put in work.

Which is the same as a would-be author sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike while he binge-watches another season of The Bachelor, or the would-be dieter buying another week’s worth of chips and cookies and sodas because, well, with family coming in to visit this week, and that company bowling night on Thursday, this just isn’t the week to start dieting.

Make no mistake — weather like this is not fit to run in!

But we get out there and run anyway. Not because it feels awesome (though it still kinda can, once you’re crazy enough), but because it keeps us in shape so that when the weather is good, we can run free like a flock of gazelles bounding across the savannah, and not like a bunch of tubby, hibernation-starved polar bears trying to run down an elk. (Can a polar bear run down an elk? Sharknado.)

And we write anyway, even when the words flow more like syrup than like water, so that when the rare buffalo of inspiration trots by, we have the agility and the insanity to leap on that buffalo and ride it until we fall off from exhaustion. Without the practice, without the bloody-headed tenacity that writing every day teaches, we’d get bucked within seconds.

Point is, we have to put in the work even when the work sucks.

There’s always a drink of water at the end of the run.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results. This week’s post was very little about process, but it made me laugh anyway — deal with it!

The Menagerie of Bad Ideas

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The mind is like a zoo.

A panoply of animals separated by a profusion of cages. Noisy kids running here and there. Somebody’s vomit there, just right there, next to a trashcan. (How they managed to get so close and miss the trashcan will forever baffle.) A series of footpaths connecting the lot. Maybe a little train to let you take it all in while you kick back and relax.

Our brains compartmentalize just like a zoo. Can’t have the dark thoughts of your latest antagonist kicking around your head while you’re pushing your little ones on the swings. Can’t have lions sharing the cage with the cockatiels. (Is that how you spell cockatiel?) Rather, you keep it all separate. Go visit the dark part of your brain when you need the antagonist. Stick to the flamingo exhibits when you’re with the kids. And so on.

Confined, Monkey, Cage, Animal, Prison, Captivity

But zoos aren’t perfect. Neither are caretakers or cages. Look at the octopus that just recently escaped to the ocean, or at any number of stories of people falling into wild animal enclosures and being mauled (or rescued!) by the inhabitants. Every once in a while, the externally-imposed order breaks down, and things get messy.

And in a zoo, that’s maybe not such a good thing. But in the mind, that’s a necessity.

If you’re like me, you’ve got maybe a dozen different story ideas swirling around in your head at any given time. And those ideas are in their cages, sure, but you can’t help noticing them as your consciousness strolls by. They rattle the bars. They chew on the locks. And occasionally, they break out. Cross-pollinate. Pollute each other.

And for the writer, that’s a very good thing.

The sci-fi idea that you had might just be awesome with a bit of that romantic comedy thrown in. The alternate-history period piece could crackle to life with a dash of the thriller you thought of last week over a plate of meatballs.

Or maybe those ideas will breed and collapse from genetic deformity.

That’s okay, too. Ideas are as numerous as grains of sand, if we’re only open to seeing them.

We can’t keep our ideas in their cages.

We’ve got to let them out once in a while.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Childish Energy

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Child, Cool, Dress, Fun, Hero, Red, Feeling, Kid, Boy

Tap, tap, tap.

It’s six AM on a Saturday, and my 4-year old is tapping on my forehead.

“Daddy, it’s Friday o’clock. It’s time to wake up.”

I grumble and open one eye at him. “Friday isn’t a number, Sprout. Time has to be a number.”

He thinks about this and says, “Dad, it’s Saturday o’clock.” Which is closer to correct.

I pull the sheet over my head. He climbs up on the bed and jumps on me. Why? Because he’s awake, the sun is coming up, and he’s ready to start his day of watching cartoons, eating fruit, drinking chocolate milk, running around in the yard, tormenting his little sister, chasing the cats, coloring on the walls, and all the other things he has to do. His schedule is a giant blank slate, but he runs from one thing to the next like he’s trying to stretch out time by moving close to the speed of light.

Seriously. He runs everywhere. To the kitchen. To the bathroom. Up the stairs to his room. To the car. After the dog. In circles around the coffee table. Everywhere. And, to shamelessly reminisce upon my post from a couple weeks ago, he does nothing halfway. With every task, every diversion, he throws himself into it like … well, like a 4-year-old hurling himself into a bouncy house.

He’s that kid that adults see and think, I wish I had that kind of energy. Imagine what we could get done! But the fact is, we do have that kind of energy, we’ve just forgotten how to channel it. We work at jobs that wear us out physically or mentally or emotionally or all of the above. We come home from those jobs tired, wanting nothing more than to collapse on the couch and watch The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or whatever Netflix show is binge-worthy this week. And it’s all we can do to haul ourselves into bed a few hours later to steal a few hours of blessed sleep before it’s time to do it all again. We don’t have energy because our momentum sucks.

We watch TV because it’s that time of day. We heave ourselves out of bed after hitting the snooze button three times because we can’t put it off any longer.

Meanwhile, my son has seemingly endless reserves of energy because he’s always moving. He doesn’t rest because he just got done coloring or because he just wants to sit down for a minute after a hard day. He rests because he has to. He’ll run fifteen laps around the playground, then come to me and say, “daddy, I’m tired, I need to take a break.” And he does. For about two minutes. Then he’s up and running for the slides again. In fact, I can hardly ever capture a decent picture of him because he is always in motion.

20141013_082555
He doesn’t even touch the *ground*.

 

He has an urgency to everything he does that I wish I could recreate. He does everything in his life like he knows it won’t last forever.

And we can too, if we let ourselves.

Momentum matters.

We come home and watch TV for hours because our momentum sucks. We drag ass and sleep in and laze around on the weekend because we feel like we need the rest to muster ourselves for another week at work. But that’s only true if we view the movement, the activity, the doing of things as an obstacle in our day.

But these things are not the obstacles in our day. They are the stuff of the day itself. They are the stuff of life. Your job. Playing with the kids. Going to the store. Cleaning the house. This is life. And if it wears us out, well, okay, maybe that’s what happens. But energy is transformative. The more you spend, the more you seem to have.

It’s why I feel like I can get more done on a day when I run than on a day when I don’t. It’s why I feel like I need to write for an hour after I push through grading a whole stack of papers. The days I feel like I can’t get anything done are the days where I just never got started and can’t break out of the funk of the negative momentum.

So, back to my son tapping on my forehead.

Six AM on a Saturday. I’d rather be sleeping. But I’m coming downstairs. Making him breakfast. Taking time out to write a little bit while he chases the cats around.

And now, I think I’m going to go chase him around the yard a little bit.

You know, fill up the tank a little.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Never Ask a Word Guy to Math Something

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The prompt for the week is “no.” Not “no” as in, “no, don’t eat that piece of chalk” or “no, don’t dump milk all over your baby sister,” but “no.” as in short for number.

Which is a dangerous topic for me, because I’m like that guy who does a few oil changes on his own car and then decides he’s capable of fine-tuning the engine, or the one who successfully builds an IKEA side table and then tries to build his own back porch complete with gazebo. I know a little bit about numbers, and I’m kind of fascinated, but I haven’t taken any math classes since high school.

Mathematics, Formula, Physics, School, Mathematical

Nevertheless, you can count anything, right? And numbers matter, don’t they? There’s the old bit about needing ten thousand hours of experience to get “good” at something that I heard somewhere. If that’s true, how long should I expect to have to plug away at this writing thing?

MATH TIME.

I aim for an hour of writing a day. That’s theoretically 365 hours a year, which means it’s likely to take … ugh … something like 28 years to log 10,000 hours that way. But I only do my capital-W project-related writing on weekdays. So make it more like 37 years.

Sharknado.

But surely, I can count writing on the blarg toward those hours, too, yeah? Well, I’m not as regular there (needs me some blogging fiber, which is a joke that only somebody over thirty could appreciate), but maybe I can claim about two-three hours per week. Which reclaims the years I had to add to make up for the weekend. So we’re back at 28 years.

But wait, do those 10,000 hours have to be dedicated to becoming better at the thing, or can they just be hours spent doing the thing?

If it’s just the doing and not the actively trying to improve that matters, then I logged a heck of a lot of hours writing assignments in college and high school. Has to be enough to get that 28 years down to 26.

And then I wrote a cough-splutter fantasy novella in high school (180 pages in number-two pencil on college-ruled paper, now that was dedication), not to mention a bunch of crappy stories. (These are all lost to the mists of time now, which may in fact be evidence of a benevolent God.) Let’s be generous and give me another two years. 24.

Oh, and there were the plays I wrote a few years back. Hard to quantify that time because I worked when the mood struck me, but surely it’s good for another couple if not trio of years. I’m liking the optimistic feel here, so call it 21 years.

Which is maybe not so bad.

But wait again! With a mental task such as writing, surely time spent planning and plotting and pondering my stories counts. I think it’s safe, then, to double my time over the past two years and bump the timer down to 19 years.

And if time plotting and pondering counts, then surely time reading writing advice counts — that’s learning after all. But at that rate, if reading counts, it’s impossible to argue that reading stories that have inspired me to write wouldn’t count.

And then the floodgates open. Reading has got to be good for at least 5,000 hours of my life, and that’s a conservative estimate, to be sure. And that means I’m just a thousand hours or so short of Mastering Writing Forever.

Geometry, Mathematics, Cube, Hexahedron, Body

Which is nonsense, of course.

Measuring these things is a mug’s game. It’s like asking how many birds are in flight right this moment in the world. Surely it’s a question with an answer. A correct answer, even — one that could theoretically be measured. But it’s a nonsense question just the same, because the means for measuring such a thing simply don’t exist. And you can no more measure the actual productive time you’ve spent in an endeavor than you can measure all the people in the world whose eyes are closed. The information is there, but we can’t know it.

And that means we can’t live in fear or doubt or frustration at the information. There’s no finish line. There’s no ticker-tape parade when you reach 10,000 hours of practice, or 5,000, or 1,000, or five. All we can do is keep plugging away, keep practicing, keep doing.

Math may be an intrinsic part of everything, but these things we do are much, much bigger than math.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.