Dan J’s Website

I often feel like a failure. But you can’t fail at your life. The pain comes from our need for narrative: you tell yourself a story of how your life is gonna go, and then, when it refuses to go that way, you hate it. Or you hate the world. Or you hate yourself.

We want life to be a story, but life is just a series of things that happen to you until they stop.

I’m still here, and still working towards finishing my first novel. After spending a lot of 2021 not doing the second draft—indeed, thinking my priority should be finding someone else to finish writing it, and then deciding, “No, I need to do this myself,” and then spending a few more months not fucking doing anything... the last few weeks have been productive. And maybe it’s only working because this time the chart on my wall where I’m recording how many scenes I edited each day was made by my girlfriend, and that’s just enough external accountability to keep me going, I don’t know.

I said to her today that trying to figure yourself out, figure out why you’re not doing the work, is a great way to avoid doing the work.

Even now, I’m composing this instead of working on the draft of the novel in the application window behind this one.

And earlier it became very important to vacuum my floor. And now I’m going to throw a load of laundry in.

And hopefully I’ll edit a couple scenes today, but boy is it painful and boringly, tediously predictable to spend the entire goddamn day psychically flogging myself for Not Writing The Novel until I finally can’t take it anymore and get some work done.

Just read that description again. This is no way to live. But it’s the way I’m living.

Shrug.

Seems like it doesn’t matter if you “know” something, like that you’d be better off just sitting down at 7 AM or 10 AM every morning and writing, so you could just enjoy the rest of your day without being crushed under psychic weight, knowing that simple solution somehow doesn’t translate into implementing it. Or, having implemented it, sticking with it for more than a couple weeks before ending up back here, in the world of the Cenobites.

If it seems hopelessly melodramatic to go on and on this way about inventing worlds with my imagination… I agree with you. Perseverating about this is boring. It’s like how every conversation for the past two years has ended up being about COVID in one way or another, and it’s not even fearsome or hopeless anymore, it’s just… fucking tiresome, isn’t it? Like, it would be a relief to think about anything else for more than a couple minutes.

And yeah, the novel thing is like that. It would be great to just not give so much of a shit.

Or, really, it would be great if the giving so much of a shit translated into disciplined and consistent work, instead of all this teenage sobbing and gnashing of teeth.

Ohhhhkay, enough of that. See how boring it is? Being ever-swirling around a whirlpool of angst is de rigueur when you’re sixteen but two dozen years later hopefully you’ve learned some coping strategies for the howling void. I guess writing this is one of them… I wonder if it helps.

To paraphrase Seth Godin on David Perell’s podcast: “Just do it” seems trite, but if you interpret “just” as “merely”, now we’re getting somewhere: merely do it, without all the dramatizing, without all the fear and anxiety about what it means, or says about you, that you are or are not writing a book…

Merely do it. It’s not that hard, really. It’s just you don’t wanna.

I don’t wanna.

Whoever those people are who “just want to write”, well, I’m happy for them. I don’t know what supreme being I pissed off in my discorporeal state in the no-place before time began, but for some reason I’m super driven to “write novels” but don’t actually want to write very much, and I just have to live with that. I guess.

A more upbeat way to look at this is to take responsibility: instead of thinking of myself as cursed, consider that I’m making a choice to put myself in this position. I guess it’s possible my life would be a flaming wreck if I didn’t make myself write a novel, if I let myself off the hook, but let’s say it wouldn’t be. Then I’m doing this really difficult thing, but I’m choosing to do it.

Lots of people don’t have a choice, you know? I’m not in a prison camp, I’m just choosing to do a thing I happen to find really hard to do.

That’s not exactly the end of the world.

You’ve got to do something with your life, and, one argument goes, you might as well do something hard. Because why not?

But there are plenty of days where you don’t feel like it. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in various of his books, interpreted by me as a way to dismiss a painful truth that you can’t really do anything about, it’s just the way it is:

So it goes. Hi ho. Poo-tee-weet!

I don’t know if that’s Buddhism, or Stoicism, or neither, or what. But if something makes you feel bad and it’s not going anywhere, an alternative to going to war with yourself is just to say, “Oh, well,” and keep on living your life. Because what’s the alternative?