Professional Crastinator
Living in the future
Unironically I have been staring at the title of this first blog post that I thought of last week. I’ve been telling myself - and others - for a while that I want to get into writing, I think it will be a good creative outlet to organise some thoughts, and ultimately drive some traffic to my website. For some aspects of my life I can be quite impulsive, if inspiration hits on a DIY project I can jump into that with ease - not even feel hunger as the desire to continue the job takes over. The tasks I struggle with, are ones that I truly want to do, but cannot get started, for seemingly no obvious reason. I’ve come to realise that I think at least one contributing factor is that I am living in the future of what the task is, what it might do for me, and what it’s going to take to achieve. The moment I sit down and decide something I want to work on, I instantly fast forward in my head to what that thing could become. I’ve wanted to learn an instrument for a very long time, but the thought in my head isn’t, “book lesson one and see”, it’s more like, “can’t wait to be a famous musician and play in a band with all my friends”. Taking up woodworking, I believe that one day it would be nice to be a fine furniture maker, build houses, and have a cool youtube channel. I don’t know if this is an uncontrollable belief in my own ability, I mean maybe I could do all of those things eventually, but I think I have identified at least one problem - the thought of mastering the skill satisfies the part of me that wants to learn that skill.
Circular Introspection
Deciding to write a blog made me think I should be practicing writing beforehand, not really thinking that the blog itself could be the practice, especially as almost no one is going to read this at this point anyway. Even rationally acknowledging that still didn’t really motivate me to start this last year, I hope I can build habits to facilitate the continued development of learning to write, maybe impart wisdom, or at the very least be somewhat interesting to someone. I know I should be not thinking in terms of “what will this lead to”, and even while writing I am second guessing every sentence. Why should I not want for this to lead somewhere, does that somehow set me up for failure? The thing is I haven’t even set up parameters for this to succeed or fail, formally at least. Does writing this just for the sake of writing really do anything for me, I think it will, I think I’ll be able to slowly organise myself towards things I truly want to achieve. But even saying that as some random guy on the internet with no following, am I over valuing myself, am I pandering to some unknown audience, and being skewed by listening to high achievers on podcasts telling me to just get started. I think I have a lot of thoughts, but no idea what I’m doing. So for what it’s worth, I am not even going to proof read this whole post, it is going to be a ceremonial note that I have written to toss into a fire, and conjure forth a version of me that does things without telling people he’s going to do them, which gives him enough praise to not even start.
Verbose Finale
One of things I’m worried about is that because I am not a writer, I have no process for editing. So what I’m battling with is the thought that this is all complete nonsense, especially on a website for woodworking. My goal for this small section is to pull this thought process to a close, and grant myself permission to write whatever comes to mind, and not at this stage think I am going to ever be a master essayist or philosophical wizard. I am going to forgive myself for putting things off, but outline some goals for what I want this to be at this time, and maybe evolve into (already thinking ahead). Structurally it’s going to be similar to this, long form thoughts, very lightly edited, probably overly repeated ideas as I work through things in my own head. I am going to try to pick a project for woodworking, and thread some form of the creative process throughout my descent into the madness of trying to be less introspective while introspecting - if that’s a word. I’m hoping to gain wisdom and maybe share some of my own. Really just generally try and convey my personality, to be relatable in some way, and share what I’m working on. I’m not a negative person by any means, I’m quite busy in a lot of ways, but not in some major areas that I want to be - this will be the permission slip I give myself to get started, no matter how rough around the edges.
