don't get it perfect. get it started.
from my "not a writer" moments
There’s much to be said about getting started.
Then getting started again.
Sometimes that’s all I feel like I am doing- beginning again.
Particularly with writing.
The discipline I want to cultivate continues to elude me and I am waiting for something to click. I am waiting for it to feel perfect. In reality it will just feels like this. Choppy and unorganized and weird. But I know I am making movements. I feel a shift. Maybe I am just tired of telling myself “I should be writing.”
We all do this, I am sure, with something. I know am not alone.
I know you need to start before you’re ready, before you think you fit the mold or look the part or whatever other bullshit we tell ourselves.
If I take inventory of anything I ever actually accomplished, the firsts were always a bit…unpolished.
It is so easy to let perfect be the enemy of the good.
What if it’s bad? Well, it might be. It probably will be. Actually, it is.
But how else does anything get to its “2.0” if there’s never a 1.0.
Burn Brightly is this weird little space where ideas have a place to live or at the very least, to be born. It certainly isn’t perfect. But it is started.
I need help. Structure. A habit. I have all these ideas but my brain, well, it has a mind of its own. Distractions, my phone, other stories, laundry, texts, tasks, all fighting for my attention, hopping up and down in the crowd of my mind screaming and waving, asking, “but what about me!?”
If I can just sit down for two god damn seconds then maybe I’ll actually get something done. Then a new issue props up. Hours go by! Hours! I look up and its 1pm, the bed is not made, my teeth are not brushed, I have eaten nothing and now I am late. I am also running a restaurant and a trying to check in with myself so I recognize me as me when I look in the mirror.
A few years ago my husband and I both went all in on our health. I’m talking, a diet diet, dry January, hard cuts were made, we went in. It actually worked and I retrained my brain, my habits and my health. I even started running again which is insane because I thought I hated running. I pictured myself running in a t-shirt that said, “not a runner.” That’s how much I didn’t feel like a runner, yet, there I was, running.
That’s how I feel right now, as a writer. I know I am here, writing, but I think I should be sitting here with a shirt that reads: not a writer.
The take away I suppose is that I am never going to feel like it, a shitty first draft is better than no shitty first draft. This is what it looks like when you don’t know what you’re doing. The difference I suppose is to have the courage to begin. And then begin again.
Thanks for reading.
Shine on.
Carolyn