This is terrible. Everything is terrible. Every single sentence I am stringing together is just downright abhorrent.

I have written, deleted, edited and re-written this post so many times that I’m getting whiplash. What I’m trying to do is write about a thing I do every single time I seem to be making headway in my life – whether it’s losing weight, writing a lot, or creating things consistently. When things start looking up, I do this thing that trips me up: I self-sabotage.

It’s why I have to write this out, even if it ends up being absolute garbage or an indecipherable mess. After WEEKS of consistent daily writing, I congratulated myself for finally achieving the most daunting task: believing in myself. But it seems like the moment I said it out loud, I triggered something. I broke the flow, and it has been 13 days since I’ve set any kind of coherent thought on paper.

This is what always happens. No, let me rephrase that: this is what I always do to myself. It’s like my brain is so afraid of failing that when I begin to get good at anything, it plugs itself up and creates all sorts of excuses to stop the progress. Something will always come up as a reason for me to stop doing what I’ve been doing, until the only thing I’m consistently doing is not doing anything.

If you look through my Instagram page, you will see an overwhelming stream of proof of this. You will see me begin a project and it will be days and weeks of posts of me just doing that one thing constantly, and then radio silence. Until I pick up another thing – dancing, learning the piano, drawing on paper, drawing digitally, writing – and I eventually drop it too. It’s a stupid, senseless, vicious cycle that I need to break, and this is me trying that. I need to write something, just to prove to myself that I am not a victim of my own making.

Recently, my friend Razzle asked me a question that made me laugh. She asked me why I had suddenly decided to pick up the hobby of writing, referring to the onslaught of blog entries I’ve been sharing in recent months. The thing is, nothing about me and writing is recent. Writing, in one form or another, has been ingrained into my being since that first entry I wrote in my Lion King journal in fourth grade. I developed a deep love and appreciation of it through essay writing contests, the high school paper, the glorious days of LiveJournal, shoddy lyrics written in secret notebooks, and eventually receiving meager earnings from contributions to small online and print magazines.

But Razzel’s question was proof of my procrastination, and I knew it. I’ve known her for years and yet she had no clue that I had some shred of writing ability. This blog has been around since 2011, and because of my constant self-sabotage, I fall into this pit of only writing when “inspiration” hit. If the words didn’t feel inspired, then I didn’t deem them worthy to see the light of day, which meant I published something once a year, if at all. That was my first mistake, and a mistake I made repeatedly throughout my life: always thinking everything had to be perfect before they were released into the world. I need to know better now. I have to know better.

This is a love/hate letter to myself. Would you like to listen in on a conversation happening in my head right now?

Kris, pick yourself up and stop rocking back and forth in that corner.

but I-

NO BUTS.

I’m terrified.

I know.

What if nothing works out?

Then we try something else.

Does that mean we failed?

It means we tried. And then we learn. Then we try again.

Okay. Then we’ll be okay?

We’ll be okay. Sometimes things won’t be, but we will be okay.

Okay.

Okay.

___________________________________

This is such a stupid entry. But I need to post it. Because I have to let my brain know that writing doesn’t require perfection, it requires that I show up. Even if i’m the only one who shows up. That should be enough.