Personal Journal

Arcs in Descension

How do I motivate myself?
This is the question of my life.
I haven’t written anything in two weeks, not a word.
What if I really don’t want to be a writer. What if the work is distasteful to me?
Work is distasteful to me. I don’t mind doing things like sweeping the kitchen floor, cleaning the dishes. I don’t put these things off. I don’t skip past them to computer games the way I do writing.
I’m saddened.
Do I care about so little, do I care about MY life so little that I’m surfeit myself in mind-numbing haze of thoughtlessness?
What’s going on in my head that I so damn often just want to keep it shut down.
Why is avoidance of life the thing I’m best at?

I came back, I intended to try. I still intend to try.
Not taking myself too seriously, I think, is the essence of honest effort. It’s so easy for me to tell people to do that for themselves, and so hard for me to do it for myself. I have these seizures of soul that are painful, and over time I’ve built an escape mechanism that requires no effort to engage. I’m like a rabbit who grazes a single leap from his hole. It’s effortless to get back to the quiet calm safe place, and then you don’t really feel motivated to get back out again.
Am I not hungry?
No, I guess I’m not.

So fine, don’t write the next Cannery Row. Write something akin to one of those pieces of garbage on a fan fiction site, only don’t let yourself focus on the word ‘garbage’.
Am I too judgemental of others? Is this a consequence of … I don’t know of what. Am I … nevermind, not a helpful thought process to walk down.

It’s a simple question, really: Are you going to write or are you going to give up?
I can’t give up. I feel it’s dishonest to take another 10 years waiting for my motivation or divine inspiration to catch up with me. In short, and I say this with a heavy heart, though I don’t understand why, I want to change. I want to make myself more than I am.
So you have to do work to accomplish that.
There is still in me the tantrums of the juvenile who refuses. Who wants it all.
Have nothing, or work. Those are the choices.

Motivation to work, and comfort from reward, that’s really where things seem to be missing.

I don’t want to let myself down anymore.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn