7:21 AM. A fight breaks out. You can only handle dragging yourself along for so long. You can only deal with this crap for so long… I feel tired and isolated. I feel like I wasted a huge amount of time. Precious years. There are many more but you lost some. You cannot just continue like you have been. You cannot keep yourself together in this way.
Do you ever get tired of talking to yourself this way? I get tired of talking to you this way. Your whole scratch pad doesn’t have to be an endless pep-talk. You can try other things — if you can think of anything else to do. You can come up with a plan for squeezing yourself out of the stupid situation you got yourself into. You need to bill your clients, and you need to finish your work. You need to complete it all. You can’t keep trudging through the jungle like this. You counted on quitting early but that’s not going to happen. Now you have to try pushing forward and finding something worthwhile. You have to imagine that someone else is not going to judge you the way you have judged yourself. You have no idea of your own capabilities, you have no understanding of your most basic potentials. Pessimism has grown so deeply into you that you have no idea what you can accomplish.
There’s a certain faith you will need to have. If I am wrong, if it really was pointless and you never stood a chance, then you will have the comfort of knowing that you did not bend to fear. If you succeed, the purpose is obvious.
“But it sufficeth that the day will end, and then the end is known.”
I would tell myself that there are no rules when it comes to this scratch pad, but I hate it when there are no rules. You have to play tennis with a net. Constraints provide resistance, and resistance engenders effort. A rule, even just one rule, creates focus. So the only rule is to stay on target and try to write something that means something. It doesn’t have to mean much but it can’t be garbage.
I’ll struggle a bit in this regard — which is the point. The point is that you will not always have something to say, that your relevant thoughts will not always be at the front of your mind and you have to draw them there. The way to do that is to sit down at the keyboard and keep going, just keep going until you figure out what the hell you’re driving at. Nobody else is going to do that work for you. There’s no one else in that Venn diagram overlap area, people who both care and are able to do something about it. You’ve got hardly anyone who cares at this point. They’re all busy with their own lives, as you should be. That’s your problem. You’ve been able to do just about anything, and as a result did nothing.
Wrap up your old projects. They take only a limited amount of time. They only require effort. Anything that requires only effort should be done.
You are too serious. Life is either not a big deal, or it is such a big deal that it must not be wasted by taking it so seriously. If these years are so precious then they are too precious to be spent stressing yourself about every small thing. You have to balance it, like everything else. The real enjoyment is in the effort; the purpose of the effort is enjoyment. Hard work does not have to be without fun.