Today, I am showing up to do the thing.
The thing I don’t want to do. The thing I am an expert at finding excuses to not do. Because it’s hard.
Because I deeply understand that I do want to do the thing, and my deep wanting raises the stakes to the point where not-doing feels safer than doing and failing at something I want so badly.
I am showing up and doing the thing anyway because I am over-caffeinated and bored and restless in my body and my mind, and I am bursting with the shame of not-doing, because not-doing goes against my being, it physically squeezes my guts like a toothpaste tube, it feels raw and wrong and rotten. Not-doing is crawling with maggots and the maggots live inside me and the only way to exorcise them is to do the thing.
It is harder to not-do the thing than it is to do the thing and yet I put up a million small barriers, I conceive of multi-layered rituals that must be completed, conditions to be fulfilled, before the thing can be done.
I imagine rewarding myself for completing the thing, once the thing is done, as if its execution isn’t reward in itself. I imagine stretching my body in the sun, free of the weight of the impending thing, the heaviness of the thing undone lagging in my limbs like shadowy sludge, released beneath the sky.
Is the thing such a burden, then, that I should spin fantasies around freedom from it?
Or do I create the gravity well of the thing myself, defy the laws of thermodynamics and generate its mass from nothing, that it should tug on my body, that my own inertia feels like being crushed inside the thing’s event horizon. Perhaps the dark matter of the universe is composed of all the undone things, the potential given shape, to enact the force of our will upon that potential and overcome a thing’s un-done-ness is to change the shape of the universe. And perhaps that is why doing the thing feels incomprehensibly huge, by extension, makes me feel unbearably small and powerless.
And yet.
Here I am, doing the thing.
Showing up and changing the universe.
One word at a time.