Hanging On or Hanging Over
Right now in this very moment, I have a hangover. Except not a drop of alcohol passed my lips the day prior. Hangover as defined by the dictionary is "a severe headache or other affects caused by drinking an access of alcohol.” But as the writer of this piece I’m taking this one degree further – defining hangover as “the pain caused by escaping previous pain.” This definition is broader to include – a whole tub of popcorn, four tacos, a donut, and a bowl of cheese called a “fundido” which didn’t pass through just my lips but my entire pie-hole the day prior.
The escape was from this – the act of writing.
Practically everyday I wake up with this blog I have a hesitance, a resistance to typing words on the screen. If I’m a positive charge (and who could deny such claims), then the act of writing also has a positive charge. No matter how hard I try to sit down in front of the computer, I always feel this attraction to get the hell away to do something else, anything else.
So yesterday as I walking around a strikingly gorgeous mall in Mexico – I decided to go to a movie theater. My reasoning was simple – I’ve never seen a movie in another country before. But in the back of my mind I felt the guilt of shying away from this writing task before me. This resistance even packed a second punch – you could even learn Spanish at the same time.
But instead of the resistance as an ambiguous force, I think of it as a dragon who happens to be very well-read and extremely intelligent. I imagine he wears Warby Parker glasses too. And he uses his thumb claw and pointer claw to remove his pristine glasses so delicately you nearly forget it’s a murderous beast, as he fires away reasons of any caliber to take me away from my writing. So his only prey is my time.
When I was in thirteen I started to read self-help books. Many of these books talked about people who were failing out of school. Instead of becoming the low-lifes their teachers thought they’d become, they took a different path entirely to achieve success and fortune. As the kid who was earning A’s and raising his hand highest of all, I thought I too could be like these authors to secure my own fame and fortune. Instead, it seems like without the hand-railings of what someone else has designed – university and jobs – I can’t do anything of my own accord.
I’ve never quite stated my intention with this blog. Henceforth, as I imagine a knight would have said in Old English, I have come to defeat the dragon. Every. Single. Day. To be good at something creative–worthy, to put the time and effort to develop something and to slay the beast within me no matter how persuasive.
I want to do something on my own. Not because I need something from it, but because the act of doing it gives me joy. I like the outcome of what I’m creating but the process of it even more so. And together they form something I’m truly excited to get to work on. Is that too much to ask?
In this first stage this blog was designed to consistently write and defeat my own worst enemy: myself.
