When you come up with a new goal, you typically have some sort of timeline in mind for how you want to progress towards that goal and when you want to achieve it. Let’s take, for example, losing weight. You don’t just want to lose 20 pounds, you want to lose them before the summer. And of course, at the outset, that’s no big deal. You’ve left yourself plenty of time—say, 9 months. That’s just about 2 pounds each month. No big deal, you say to yourself. That blog post you read said losing around 2 pounds per month is a healthy goal.
Then you find yourself 3 months out from summer with only about 6 or 7 workouts under your belt, and a few dozen less salads in your body than you had anticipated. But as far as you’re concerned, you’re still 20 pounds over weight, and summer still starts in 3 months. So you dive back into the internet until you find a blog post that says you can lost 10 pounds in a month—look, you’ve even given yourself an extra month as a cushion!
But getting in shape is no longer something you can achieve with moderate, calm effort. Now you’re frantic. Forget allowing yourself a quick handful of chips—you can’t even have one! You’re too far behind! And while at the outset, you’d left yourself time to ramp up your workout regimen gradually, now you’re running, lifting, and biking all in the same day, every single day, after eight consecutive weeks of almost no exercise. In short, you’ve turned yourself into a crazy person. Because you’re not just trying to lose weight, you’re also trying to reclaim 6 months of lost time.
As I’ve said before, writing and exercise parallel one another pretty well, or at least in my life they do. For me, writing is a constant game of catch-up. I think of all of the times I didn’t write, and where I would be now if I had. Then I try to get to where I should be. Preferably before the weekend. That running/biking/lifting regimen manifests as crazy word counts, or unfathomable daily hour targets. Instead of worrying about eating a single chip, I obsess over squandering a single minute. I dive from activity to activity while doing my best impression of a robot—my focus is on efficiency and nothing else.
When you decide to dive off the deep end with exercise, that crazy regimen is manageable at first. Sometimes for a day. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes even for 2 weeks. But it is, ultimately, unsustainable. Pretty soon, all you can think about is sleep, and before you know it you’re back to not working out at all. The robot writing regimen works the same way. I can suck the wasted seconds out of my day for a little while, but the need to be a human being inevitably comes crashing back in, and in almost no time at all I’ve shot back in the other direction and I find myself cramming seemingly endless hours of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and TV into my week.
Let’s do a thought experiment together: What would a mature response to this sort of scenario be? If you’ve woken up to find yourself with a calendar of wasted days, weeks, months, or even years behind you, what would be a healthy way to respond? I’d posit that someone without an affinity for masochism would accept their failings, put that wasted time behind them, and emerge with the resolve not to let it happen again.
But see, that doesn’t work for me. If I push back that imaginary due date I’ve set for myself—my summer swimsuit debut—then I admit that I actually made a mistake. I admit I wasted time. I admit that I failed. Read any interview with a writer, and they will regale you with a tale of dozens of unpublished, unloved stories. “I needed to get them out of my system,” they’ll say. “It took years to be an overnight success.” Fine. Great. Wonderful. That sounds like an awesome plan, which is why I told myself I’d start on my crappy stories years ago. But now here we are, at the point where I’m supposed to be successful, where I’m supposed to have something to show for myself, and all I have is a folder of abandoned, barely begun projects.
Well, the solution is simple: Hit a home run my first time at bat. All those other authors took years. I’ll just have to make my first story a resounding success. Then, boom, I’m exactly where I need to be. Forget 3 months—I’ll lose those 20 pounds in a week!
When I sit down to write, I feel each of those wasted nights pressing down on me. Each minute needs to make up for a week where I should’ve done more, where I should’ve done something. How can I be having a hard time tonight? I can’t have a hard time tonight. I can’t afford to. I have to have everything figured out and be a prolific writer by the end of the month.
I have a hard time admitting to myself that the time I’ve squandered is gone. I can’t face that lost time. But the problem is, that time is wasted. What I’m hiding from is reality. And to avoid that reality, I avoid writing. To open a new document and see that empty page means realizing that there are not nearly enough full ones. To lose my focus after 15 minutes reminds me of the hours I didn’t spend writing and building up my endurance. My brain is flabby, weak, and easily winded. But if I never put it to the test, I never have to face that fact. So I trap myself in a cycle. To avoid the fact that I haven’t written, I avoid writing. And so the problem grows, and that dread of facing my failures looms larger each time. My frustration at not having written feeds on itself, setting me back further and making the game of catch up that much harder.
The weight of wasted time is unbearable. It is impossible to shoulder it and move forward, even the slightest bit. So I am going to type the next words without yet truly believing them, in the hopes that I will eventually come to accept them:
The time I have wasted is gone. It cannot be made up. It cannot be reclaimed. There is no getting it back.
My mother has a saying that I have heard since I was a child, and the older I get, the more I come to appreciate it:
If every decision in your life up until this point, everything that has led you here, has been a mistake—you are still here.
So how are you going to move forward?