Day 10 or 11, depending: can’t win for losing.

It seems Wednesday’s post (in which I announced I was taking Thursday off) not only failed to publish, but has vanished completely.

I’m not terribly upset. It wasn’t very good.

It irks me that it may appear that I skipped two days though, but I wonder…who cares about that but me? Answer: (crickets) yeah. almost certainly no one.

I have something to say about the day off, though, and this day that followed it:
Though both were hard days (in their own ways), this day was easier…maybe, just maybe, because I took yesterday off.

I MADE myself take yesterday off. I did not ALLOW myself to do anything I did not want to do. I did not allow myself to feel guilty (or I stopped it as soon as possible) for not doing more. IT WAS SO HARD. Way harder than working. On anything.

The result, maybe “a” result, was that, today, I did not spend an unnecessary amount of time doing things I did not want to do. I have done what I needed to, but I haven’t agonized over every little thing like I usually do.

Dare I say it? Am I…RELAXING? Let’s not be hasty. Maybe a tad.

The point of all this (maybe “a” point) is to say something I have to keep reminding myself of (so I may have said it before). Learning to do ANYTHING (even take a day off) means you don’t know how to do it already. Which means you’re bad at it.

We all (even me) have to be bad at things before we can be good at them.

I am bad at relaxing.

Day 8: I am scared of being sick and of skipping a day.

So. I am acknowledging that I have a terrible headache (and that’s reason enough to take a break).

Also. I don’t feel like doing much these days anyway (and any excuse will do).

Therefore. I am not where I wish to be (but I am no longer where I was).

Day 7: I’m afraid of making mistakes.

I thought I wasn’t, but I am. More specifically, I am afraid of making the same mistake too many times…when I should know better by now.

When someone asked me today if I was ok, then said, “this is happening a lot,” I actually thought about it instead of immediately freaking out. No, it isn’t happening a lot, I just don’t yet grasp how to deal with it quickly, so I ask for help, rather than slowing everyone down by trying to figure it out for myself.

Maybe I ask for help a lot. That’s a new thing for me, but something I was encouraged to do, and have been trying to do more frequently. Perhaps this is wrong, but I don’t think so.

I am also afraid I am not as quick a learner as I used to be.

But…

Learning takes time, practice, and patience. It especially involves messing up. Learning how NOT to do something has often been a far more effective teacher for me than learning how to do something right the first time.

So, just as I chose to rest from this task yesterday (even God took off one day in seven), I’m choosing today to be patient with myself. Give myself a break from not knowing/having figured everything out all at once.

Slow progress is not NO progress.

Day 6: Guilt and Shame are forms of Fear too, I think.

It was raining when I woke up this morning, and my resolutions went right out my bedroom window because…oh goodie! I love sleeping in on rainy mornings.

There are very few better feelings, for me, and very few worse feelings than getting up, eventually, and realizing how much time I’ve “wasted.”

I once heard that living in the past causes depression, living in the future causes anxiety, and only when we live in the present are we content. Perhaps these terms are just tired for me, but I think guilt and shame are similar, if not the same. These are two things I’m trying to banish from my life in my present, and I have learned that they involve facing fears too.

Guilt is usually the fear that I have (already) done something wrong, inappropriate, unhelpful, inconsiderate, etc.
Shame is the fear that I will continue to do so, and/or that I will be a) unable to make it better/correct my faux pas b) make things worse by attempting to do so.
Shame is also the fear that I just AM wrong, and guilt will forever remind me of this, no matter what I do.

I faced both today. I’m not sure I won, but I faced them.

Day 5: not QUITE Cinco de Mayo

This is actually the 5th “holiday” post I’ve written, but, this one will see the light of day. Because Star Wars.

The other days of remembrance I wrote about were (in the order I wrote them):
9/11
(Possibly MLK JR. Day)
Ash Wednesday/Valentine’s Day
April Fool’s Day/Easter

At the time I remember being too afraid to publish without rethinking my wording. Now I’m realizing it must have been the dying breaths of my liberal feminism objecting to what must appear a shocking amount of white republicanism. At least that’s what those terms meant last I understood them, but it seems those labels shift definitions rapidly. They also vary widely according to who’s talking.

Speaking of politics, can we all agree on Star Wars? Apparently even that is up for debate. It makes me feel old to hear the young people squabble over their favorites. I’m just thinking…”you get one EVERY YEAR!”

Well, I still believe in the Force and its power to bring together nerds of every description.

I do wonder if it’s irony, or cynicism, that makes me think of all the mexican restaurants that will definitely be open tomorrow.

Day 4: Confession: I still haven’t done the exercise.

Between yesterday and today, it occured to me to wonder…

Do bumblebees have body issues?

I wonder if bumblebees heard often enough that they were not supposed to be able to fly, if fewer of them would even try.

Only so many fears can be faced in one day. That’s all I got today.

Nevertheless, she persisted…or whatever the actual quote from Watership Down is.

Day 3: “‘Simple’ and ‘Easy’ are not the same thing.” – a friend of mine

It may not be the most famous scene from The Notebook, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with (mostly from memes—the funniest one went something like “when you ask your girl where she wants to eat”): It’s the one where Noah (Ryan Gosling) asks Allie (Rachel McAdams) over and over “what do you want?” while she just shakes her head and says “it’s not that simple.”

I cannot believe I opened with a Nicholas Sparks example. Oh well…it’s funny and it’s true.

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been trying to do two things at once (1. dream as big as possible 2. narrow/eliminated dreams based on a variety of criteria) that are not only incompatible with each other, but actually impossible.

So I feel very much like I am always having the Noah/Allie convo in my head…which is funny, when it’s not so depressing.

Ready for the tangent? Did you know a bumblebee should not be able to fly? According to whatever laws of physics and/or aerodynamics (or so I understand), it’s body is too big and it’s wings are too small.

Nevertheless, it does.

I have a habit of believing the impossible, which is not a bad habit, but not a terribly practical one either, when it comes to my own life. Believing the impossible CAN happen does not mean it WILL happen without some other things in place. In other words, it’s simple for me to believe that I can have/do anything I want; it’s not easy for me to know either what that is or how to get it.

I do know waiting around for my own ‘nevertheless’ isn’t going to work. So I keep flapping those wings.

Day 2: I am crazy, and/but my intentions are good.

These are both things that people continually tell me about myself, and that I continually believe, but depending on who says it and how, both can mean a variety of different things to me. The result has been a jumbled inner narrative that I can’t quite get sorted.

Kind of like having a holiday that hardly anyone celebrates (or even remembers anymore) mean the same thing as a distress call. Do you want flowers and dancing? Or an ambulance?

This is (sort of) going somewhere. Yesterday I mentioned the Do It Scared podcast by Ruth Soukup, and that episode1 [someday maybe I will link it here] outlines a four-step strategy that I had both heard before/instantly dismissed and considered in a new way.
Step 1 is Dream Big-everything that you would do if you had infinite resources.
Step 2 is Narrow that list to what you really want to do.

Here’s another fear of mine: admitting how I’ve screwed up. Not THAT I’ve screwed up, but HOW I have. I believe in and try to accept the grace I am offered, wherever it comes from, but I hate admitting that I didn’t think through the implications, i.e. forsee the mistake I was going to make, before I made it.

I realized it was actually IMPOSSIBLE (not just a fun thought experiment) to do Step 1 and Step 2 at the same time

I cannot dream as big as I want to dream, while simultaneously narrowing by what is possible/likely/really interesting to me. Instead I try to do it all and let things weed themselves out.

Just like my borderline perfectionist tendency to anticipate my own mistakes, this is shooting myself in the foot, at the very least.

So is believing that I am either crazy, well intentioned, or both, unless I know exactly what those things mean to me.

So is answering my earlier hypothetical question—would you prefer flowers and dancing or an ambulance?—with “both?” almost certainly what I would say on the spot, when, if I really thought about it, I’d probably infinitely prefer that no ambulances were involved in my May Day celebrations.

I recently got a notification email from Ruth Soukup founder of [A WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF that I occasionally follow*] about her new podcast and upcoming book Do It Scared. I signed up to preview the first 3 episodes, and the podcast went live today. It’s on Itunes. This is me promoting it.**

I thought this was an idea I could get behind, because I am doing something I’m scared of literally every single day. In fact, I’m almost always doing several things that scare me, and as I listened to her first episode, I felt both encouraged and discouraged in some new and familiar ways.

First, the advice she gives, or the plan she maps out, is something I’ve heard (and tried) before, so my initial thought was this doesn’t work for me, but as I continued to listen, and (arguably more importantly) as I thought about the implications of what she had said, a new thought occurred to me.

I’ve relied too hard on a system to work for me, without really processing what that system meant for me, specifically.

There are a few other, almost certainly simpler ways for me to put this, but I’ll save them for tomorrow, or the next day…because the second thing I heard/learned that both encouraged and frightened me a little was this: She had no idea what she was doing when she started either.

That seems like a no-brainer (and it probably should be), but for some reason, that is a fear I do not have—starting from scratch. I realized the fear that has been holding me back the most is one I thought I had confronted a long time ago, but alas, is still with me (perhaps always will be)…but more on that later too.

For now, the Do It Scared Manifesto for litewings.ink is:
1. Blog until it’s not scary. yes…that means every day.
2. Hit publish and forget that you (I) don’t make sense.

I can feel the cold sweats already, ha!

*see, if I was a real blogger, I’d list all that stuff, but that would defeat the purpose of this exercise.
**I’m also scared of pretty much every form of social media, so I’m hoping in the future one of my scared activities will be delving into that.

The most difficult part of telling a story is deciding where to begin.

“The beginning” is always a safe bet, unless you know how long my stories can be.

“Start Somewhere” is another bit of conventional wisdom that I often find just as baffling as it is helpful, until I remember that ‘here’ is ‘somewhere’ too.

So. Here it is. And it just so happens that Here feels like (yet another) beginning of sorts. Starting Over.

The most difficult part of starting over is remembering all the ways you screwed up the last (four or five) time(s) you began, and trying not to do that again. But screwing up is part of starting anything. It’s part of learning.

So, of all the stories I thought I would tell, it turns out the only cohesive one I’ve got right now is about how I’m trying to start over, trying to screw up, trying to NOT screw up (as much or again), and trying to be ok with a certain amount of screwing up. And it’s not much of a story.

This is hard.  Everything I’m starting, everything I’m remembering, doing my best and trying to give myself grace when my best is not good enough—it’s all hard.

I keep telling myself it will get easier. Some of it. Maybe all of it. Until then, this is what I’ve got.