“I must not Fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where it has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
The Litany against Fear,
Dune
-Frank Herbert
Getting back to writing has been an intimidating task. There’s a saying, “sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something.” The fact is, this only holds true for your first go around. After that it’s more, “being worse at something is the first step to getting back to where you were at that thing, which is the first step to getting sort of good at it.”
I’ve experienced this with a number of things in my life- my recent foray into music in Nashville after a lengthy break, current attempts to get involved with music in New York City, and getting back to writing after such a length break. I see that returning to a skill is made particularly difficult due to a potent combination of:
- Regret for having stopped in the first place
- Noticing a notable decline in skills
- Feeling like a beginner again, after already having been one
Do you see the one thread tying all three of those reasons together? None of them actually prevent you from doing it. They’re all mental, all bullshit, all excuses. I can weave as many narratives around why the thing I want is hard and I can’t do it, but the only hard thing about the above is facing the fear. There is nothing to be lost in the writing, in the sharing, in the putting it out there. There is nothing hard in the doing. There is only difficulty in hurdling the fear, in discovering the other side to be experienced.
Memento Mori.
-Justin