I have a nasty habit of overthinking things, something that I recently hinted at. A certain amount of this is fine, sure, but not when your line of thought is desperately self-defeating. My friend Ashley summed this up nicely:
I have this very simple narrative in my mind about how one accomplishes goals. You make up your mind to do it, then you start, then you kick some ass, then you high five everyone, and then you carry on feeling pretty damn good about yourself.
I frequently break down somewhere along the lines of the “getting started” part. I attribute much of this to growing pains. When I graduated with my interpreting degree in 2006, the thing I wanted, more than anything, was to just be good at it already. More than five years later, I realize that while it is frustrating to start at the beginning, it’s worth it. Being a rookie is a good thing. The drive is there to want to be great, but there’s only one way to get there. Nothing happens overnight.
Now that I’ve kick-started my second career, I’m repeating this same process, and it’s weird, to say the least, to have both the novice perspective and the “slightly experienced” one.
Having taken an extensive hiatus from blogging, it’s weird trying to get back into it. I’m not the same person I was when I started, and I’m not the same writer. I’ve realized lately that I miss that person. I miss the abandon with which I could write. And instead of going forth and writing, I sat around thinking.
Strange as it sounds for someone who likes to write, I’ve never kept a journal. I’ve fancied the idea for ages, ever since I was a teen. But I abandoned that idea because journals were something that could be found and read, and I feared I would share secrets I didn’t want known. Last month, I picked up an empty journal I had laying around, unused. After flipping through its empty pages, I grabbed a pen and started writing.
Every time I write in that journal now, I feel more liberated. I can think things through. Maybe some of my late nights spent thinking can lead to some sort of revelation. And maybe not. It doesn’t matter, because it’s the process that is fun. Even if I never go back to read it, I had fun writing it. I see those pages differently now; the empty pages look up at me, beckoning to be filled with words. And every day, or every few days, I am happy to oblige their longing.
I will find my way again, I’m sure. I didn’t realize it until now, but my path to losing weight last year was made possible only because I didn’t have a seemingly impossible number in mind. I didn’t think “Only 49 pounds to reach my goal of 50!”; my objective was to lose one pound. And then another. And another. And before I knew it, I’d done that over 50 times.
I’ll write one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. And when I look back, I suspect I’ll find I enjoyed the hell out of it all. And that’s something, I think, that is worth writing about.
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