Photo by Tilly Jensen on Unsplash
“Why the hell was I doing this to myself?”, I thought as I trudged alone through the snow towards the brutalist structure ahead of me.
It was four-thirty in the morning and I was freezing. The parking lot looked abandoned, a vast concrete wasteland under the harsh industrial glow of streetlamps.
Was I in a Zombie apocalypse in the middle of winter?
I was headed to swim practice and I had spent the night at my aunt's house which was walking distance from the school, and since I was a Michigan native trudging through snow in sub zero temps was a normal thing. It never got easier, I just learned to deal with it.
To man up, to grin and bear it.
I enter the locker room and change into a pair of spandex undies which is basically what a Speedo is, and stand at the edge of the the icebox water of the pool, still shivering from my winter commute.
My teammates are lined up like ducks, all hesitating to take the plunge. The coach, a virile youngish man in his prime looks at us and says this:
“The longer you stand around — the longer you stand around.”
With that nugget, we all jump in and deal with it. It never got easier, but by the time you finished a few laps you warmed up and all the cold was gone from your body.
Sometimes building a writing habit is like that too. The longer we stand around and hesitate nothing gets done.
We waste time.
We stand still.
Nothing gets done.
The best advice is to plunge into the unknown, into the cold of your fears, your doubts, and your insecurities, and to just do it.
In swimming sometimes that is one stroke at a time, one lap at a time.
I can remember one time at a competition I was part of a relay and when I dove in my goggles slipped and got caught in my mouth like a gag, but I couldn’t let my teammates down. Stopping to adjust it would have meant disqualifying the entire race for my team, so I pushed through it, gagging, choking, and sputtering through chlorine pool water for the longest two laps of my life.
I gave it my all, and by the end of my laps I was so dead tired my teammates had to help pull me up out of the water onto the deck, but I felt the deepest sense of satisfaction. I knew that I did it, I fought through being blinded and gagged because I wanted to do my best no matter what.
I was never the best swimmer, but damn I gave it my all, and by the end of the season I was in the best shape of my life and felt proud of myself for pushing past all my self-limiting beliefs to do what I said I would do.
Sometimes I get in front of the screen and a million ideas pop into my head, but I feel paralyzed at how to capture them, and paralyzed by the doubts about whether I’ll ever get good at it.
“Nobody reads this shit anyway”, I’ll think.
“What’s the point?” I’m throwing words into a black hole, and they’re crossing the edge of some event horizon where they’re trapped forever.
Then I step back and push the self-pitying thoughts away and think of that day I trudged through the snow and heard my coach's advice.
“The longer you stand around — the longer you stand around.”
Nothing gets done if you don’t take the plunge and start swimming.
One stroke at a time.
One idea at a time.
One draft at a time.
One day at a time.
So join me at the poolside and stop standing around. Start swimming.
Thanks for reading.
