In-momentum

Hesitation breeds more of the same. My most prominent feature is a stop button, and like both the clitoris and the TARDIS, it’s bigger on the inside. (Relationships and writing; I fawn in both. Probably time travel.) My ability to stop is world-renowned. Or would be if I ever didn’t stop myself from putting that out there.

            It’s important, perhaps especially for writers, or creatives, to note that when you accumulate nothing, it’s not nothing. That is, it’s not nothing that you’re accumulating, but something. What I’ve created is a habit of doing nothing. It is an accumulation of not-doing. It is a build-up of the opposite of what I want or need – but try telling my f’d brain. (The four fs of trauma, which is also how you often end up expressing it.) In other words, a habit – a positive, negative one, rather than nothing at all. I’ve built something, here, whose neural pathways are strong, etched to hard grooves in the parts of my brain where they definitely exist, the mental image of which feels pretty ouch-ey.

The point is, they’re there.

            It’s not an accurate reflection of the work I put in to staying exactly where I am. I bust myself to earn just a little bit less from (good) work than I would get handed for doing nothing. But I don’t want to do nothing (especially when I’m not).

            There’s also the mental work. There’s a lot of it going on behind the scenes. Climbing through certain things every day – like chronic illness, mental illness, and the weird shit that trauma has made into unconscious habit for ages – just to get to the blank white computer screen.

            It’s better to publish something short rather than nothing long.

Here’s something useful and related. It’s James Clear on instagram.

Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash.