This is my 800th wordvomit! I am now 80% done with this project that I started way back in 2012.
For starters I’m curious to see how I’ve marked my previous “100 done” milestones. In chronological order, we have…
0100 – quitting an addiction is like leaving an abusive relationship – well this hints at the darker origins of my earlier writing – I was struggling to become a better version of myself, and trying to drum up the courage to do it. There’s no mention of the milestone stuff, I’m not sure why. Maybe it just didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.
0201 – breathe – picked 201 because I’m not sure I wrote 200 knowing that it was going to be 200. I used to write in my Evernote on the way to work, and sometimes I would write multiple wordvomits without knowing what the latest count was. (This occasionally led to some complications with publishing, like publishing the same vomit twice, which I think I’ve mostly corrected for – but if in my final review I find that there are still duplicates, I think I will rewrite the duplicate wordvomit from scratch). Anyway. In this vomit I talk about having health issues, and I talked about how I was going to fight to prevail.
0300 – break free from your stale, suffocating patterns This is a dialogue I wrote between two fictional versions of myself, and you I see the same theme as the last two – it’s interesting that there’s a glimmer of non-coercion in there with “put down the whip”.
0400 – stop hoarding truth in boxes – this was a good post that I revisit from time to time. Looking at the title now, though, I wonder what it would be like to reframe it in the positive. “Unbox your hoarded truths”, maybe. The core idea is similar to what I was talking about in the previous post – the idea that it’s challenging to figure out what the truths of things are, and it can be emotionally challenging, so we have to cultivate courage… it’s all connected.
0500 – I’m proud of you – aww, this is lovely to read. It was a message of support and encouragement from my past self, to me now. I’m glad to receive it! Thank you, past me! I will honour your sacrifices and build the life you dreamed of.
0601 – consider the writer’s end-game (601 because 599 and 600 were combined). Here I’ve started to think about my longer-term goals as a writer. I’m thinking about prioritising what sorts of content I should publish to have a career, thinking about audience building, and there’s mention about writing and selling an ebook! Well that has certainly come to pass! I love to see it. That was in 2016, and I started selling Friendly Ambitious Nerd in 2020. That took longer than I would’ve guessed. Fascinating. There are always clues from the beginning. I should go back and re-read more old wordvomits to look for more clues.
0700 – accept where you are – I wrote this 3 months before my 28th birthday. Since then my progress on my wordvomits have been relatively sluggish, I think because I started spending way more time on Twitter. Interestingly, it seemed like I was more anxious about getting older at 28, than I did when I turned 30. I’m not sure I even wrote any lengthy introspection upon turning 30, though I do have a tweet about how wonderful it’s been. I think I meant to put together some notes, but it got all smooshed up with the fact that I’m writing a book that’s basically a gift to my younger self.
And here we are, at 800! And I have about 400 words to talk about courage.
The word “encourage” I think somehow seems less intense than “courage”, which brings to mind ideas of valor, bravery in combat, that sort of thing. But I think courage is fundamentally about facing up to your fears, and it’s plausible to me, having read some accounts of warriors who return home, that it can be harder to be courageous in peace than in war.
Courage is contagious, you can become more courageous by associating with other courageous people. People who dare to do challenging and difficult things, people who dare to be wrong, and to admit to being wrong. Witnessing other people work on their own challenges can give you the boost you need to work on your own, if only so that you can get into a position where you can better support your kinsmen.
I think a lot about this Tumblr post about how someone found it difficult to talk to service staff to correct a mistake in their own order, but become polished and functional when doing it on behalf of a friend. And therein lies a powerful secret about courage: it’s almost always easier to be courageous for our friends. So choose good friends, people you respect and admire, and be courageous for them.
Life is short. We’re all going to die. In this short amount of time, we have the opportunity to live gloriously, to do what our hearts desire, to do what we think is esteemed and worthy and good. But not many people live lives like this. And it’s easy (and correct, to some degree) to say that, oh, well, not everybody has the privilege, not everybody has the money, some people have dependents, some people are disabled, some people are X, some people are Y. And that can all be true. You might have it worse than most people. I totally believe that. And still, the question is, what are you doing with the space that you have? What are you doing within the narrow context, the domain that is yours? Because you always have a domain that is yours, that nobody else can take away from you unless you let them. If nothing else, you can be fiercely independent about the contents of your mind. You can insist, through sheer force of will, that you will not give up on your dreams, and that if you can’t make your big dream happen, well, you can try and make a smaller version of that dream happen. You can be relentless. You can be bigger, braver, bolder, more daring than you think, and you can use your limited time on this earth to create something wonderful. I really believe this. And as long as there are artists on this earth, people who make music and movies and comics for the enjoyment of others, I will continue to believe this. I am on their team to the last man.
Let’s fucking go.