Should I Make It?
I am not good at following through on my efforts.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to answer phones for my day job if I had been able to complete a few of my abandoned projects. Certainly, if even a couple of them had been completed, I would feel better about myself and my life.
I am grateful for the opportunity my day job affords me to do effective good. My work is serious enough to make a material difference in the quality of peoples lives. I have the responsibility to use my creative freedom to decide how best to communicate with the people I serve and the people working in various parts of our complicated system, and my success in doing so can very directly help people’s literal lives. When disappointment disturbs me, I tell myself that I’ve learned that I need to be doing something serious and real, that I would ultimately respect my self less if I got to do fun creative work for someone else’s petty commercial purposes.
Still, I’m frustrated by my inability turn my thoughts into external realities. There is a reward to creating something that is not tied to its popularity or to any benefit that may be earned from it. This is why I cannot, as someone I respect once suggested, be satisfied with writing my thoughts in journals and then leaving those journals in a dark drawer. I don't need to pursue recognition or money with my creative projects, but I need them to be real. They need to be completed and have a full existence outside of myself. They must be joined to the world, indexed and filed away among the thoughts and expressions that have come out from humanity.
Practically, this means that they have to be at least published on the Internet, even if I am the only who would ever look them up. It matters tremendously that someone hypothetically could find my creations and consider my thoughts, even if no one may ever do so.
It matters more to me that my ideas and unfulfilled dreams are unambiguously made real than that I have close friends to talk to about my life. Commiserating with friends can be a form of despair, wherein we affirm each other in the hopelessness of our dreams. Furthermore, I am always gripped by the fear that I continue to be a burden to those who have made the mistake of trying to really listen to me. Experience has taught me that I need to avoid confiding in people, because I simply don’t experience the natural sense of boundaries or innate measure of appropriateness that characterizes most people’s conversations.
That is why today I find myself in a familiar sprint. It’s morning, and I have to be at work in an hour. I had awakened reasonably early and had commenced a search for some information that I’m going to need to make progress on chores during my lunch break, which means I’ll be spending the time in more hateful phone calls in the unnecessarily bureaucratic systems that companies both large and small use to marginalize people and avoid their real needs. As part of such a company, I will be doing my best to be the difference, to pull strings for people however I can, to leave people with a tangible sense of a way forward and to follow through on my word. It’s so exhausting, and I don’t always live up to my resolution. I wonder whether or not the people I talk to on my lunch break are really trying to help me, whether anyone else really cares.
My motivation to persevere is strongly influenced by whether or not I have succeed in creating something real out of my life during the blurry smear of time that I have between clocking out and clocking back in. Whenever I successfully create something that is full and real, I receive a jolt of motivation that can help carry me through another draining day and the shuddering uncertainty of my life and personal security.
Publishing something on the Internet is not quite the only thing that makes me feel good in the morning. Other things help, such as practicing my Spanish or Esperanto. Yet finishing something and putting it out there is the most reliable and strongest motivational power-up that I know, and it is a benefit that I can give myself.
The ending is always ambiguous. In this fact there may be some hope. An incomplete mess is a failure. The failure to count the cost of idealism is a true failure. But when time has been spent creatively, and an honest thought is consequently given form and expression, then no doubt will ever be cast upon the completeness of the endeavor.
Maybe I'll even take a shower.