Faker

Calculating the Cost of Tomorrow

As I embark on this new activity of sharing my writing, I find that I am anxious. Something about sharing feels intimidating. Am I sharing too much? Does anyone need to read what I write? There are already so many writers - accomplished writers that inspire me to think and learn and write, and then so many others like me writing for an audience of one. In wondering if I belong here, I am struck by the acute irony of my own anxious feelings and the theme of The Same Rules. To be bold enough to build a blog, but vulnerable enough to second guess its creation is so very human - we stutter along, mustering courage, hiding our bad cards, staring in the mirror to ask ourselves if we should be here.

For much of my life, I’ve believed I could be a writer. I even went so far as to suggest to myself that I was already a writer, but in secret, hidden behind excuses. “I am a writer, I just haven’t written anything yet”. I told myself stories to justify my inaction. I wasn’t ready. Nobody wanted to read it. I could do it tomorrow.

I wasn’t ready because I couldn’t write well enough. I wasn’t good enough to justify a reader’s time. I hadn’t studied writing. I didn’t have something to write about. I didn’t have the time. I didn’t know how to structure prose.

Nobody would read my writing because I had nothing to say. Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant were great aggregators of information and earned their readers’ time through exhaustive research and the connecting of dots. Danny Kahneman was a genius that literally invented his own category and won a Nobel Prize doing so. Viktor Frankl and Amy Tan and Kiese Laymon and Viet Thanh Nguyen had stories to tell that were interesting and meaningful and spoke to the human experience. Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway were luminaries, giants who defined a generation of writing. I was just a beekeeper’s son who had it pretty good, all things considered. Fate had not handed me a platform from which to offer insight and perspective.

I would wait. I could do it tomorrow. I’d be older. Something meaningful would happen. I’d find something to say along the way. I’d write when it was time, when I had time, when I believed I was a writer.

I’ve been reflecting recently that the only thing we cannot make more of is time. Time is finite. Time never stops. Every moment we don’t act is a moment we lose. Forever. What I cannot ever get back is those years to write. In a way, our lifetime is a vessel we fill with moments. Every moment defines us. And over a lifetime, those moments develop into stories and those stories develop into seasons and those seasons develop into who we become. Once a moment drops into the vessel, you can’t pull it back out. That realization came late enough to be bitter, but hopefully early enough to be sweet.

Today is tomorrow.

I decided I was ready when I learned that writing is not a noun, but a verb. Great writers don’t spring from the void as fully formed writers, they grind at the act of writing for years. They treat it like a job. They write first and become a writer second. I spent years waiting to feel like a writer when I could’ve just become one.

I’ve stopped waiting for permission to write. While I thought I was looking for permission from some undefined audience, I was really looking for permission from myself. I couldn’t get external validation without acting first. You can’t know if people will read your writing or listen to your music or buy your products until you write or sing or sell. You have to commit to the direction and see what happens.

Where once the act of writing was an achievement in itself, it is now easier to produce content than ever before and we find ourselves drowning in a sea of words and images. Anyone with access and basic prompting knowledge can write a novel in under an hour. I thought that AI had closed the door, that I’d finally waited too long. But a world of AI-written material was precisely where I wanted to write out loud. Maybe people did finally need it. In some ways, writing feels like a protest in a world where being merely human has become a weakness.

The act of actually writing costs me nothing. The waiting can cost us everything.