The Choosing Is the Whole Answer

I am going to share this thing even though the sharing feels like opening a part of myself in public that I have only ever been willing to open in private circle with the lights turned low,
I am going to share this thing and feel the particular exposure of having made something that cannot be explained away too easy to reveal, because every choice in it was delicately true and mine,
I am going to share this thing and let the response be whatever it is going to be, without trying to manage in advance what I cannot actually control from here on,
Is the fear I’m experiencing right now about the work itself or about what the world will think of me, based on the fact that I experienced it and chose to share it with the world,
I am going to share this thing or I am going to be afraid when I do it, both of those things are going to be true at the exact same time and neither one of them cancels the other out...

I have kept going past the fear before and felt it transform mid-motion into something that was not the absence of fear but a different relationship to it that I have never been able to fully comprehend,
I have kept going past the fear and found that the thing I was afraid of was almost never as terrible as the version my anticipation had been carefully constructing in advance,
I have persisted past my fear and discovered that the version of myself on the other side wasn’t the fearless one I had been waiting to become, but rather the same one I’ve been dreaming of,
What has staying on this side of the fear actually protected me from has cost me in the accumulated weight of all the things I almost made, almost shared and almost became,
I have kept going past the fear enough times now to know that it does not leave, does not resolve and does not reward me with certainty, that this is not a failure of the process but the process itself...

I want to make the next thing before this one has finished settling, I am learning to understand that urgency as something closer to aliveness than to impatience,
I want to make the next thing as I am learning to let the wanting be the signal than the problem, it has sometimes felt like when it arrived before it was safely behind me,
I want to make the next thing, one after that and the rhythm of the wanting is the rhythm of someone who has not yet made peace with the past, but stopping is never the solution,
What is the version of my creative life that exists not as one singular defining work, but of everything I kept choosing to make across all the seasons of creating,
I want to make the next thing the wanting, not greed or restlessness or the inability to be satisfied, but the specific and undeniable sign that is still living, and still mine...

I am choosing this even though no deadline exists that I did not give myself and no kind of authority stands over this work but with the power to force it out of me,
I am choosing this on the days when the choosing feels like privilege, on the days when it feels like the most difficult and unrewarding, unclear thing I could have spend my hours on,
I am choosing this because the version of me does not choose this: a quieter version, a safer version, and a version that gets to dig into the particular pain of making real things,
If I were to stop choosing this tomorrow, what would be the first thing I would miss about it, and what am I making right now or have I been making it without for longer than I have admitted,
I am choosing this to answer every question that has ever asked me, whether I was sure, whether I was ready and whether I had any idea what I was doing,
And the answer is and has always been yes, now, I am choosing this...

Watchwords:
Open in public what I only opened in private,
Fear transformed mid-motion not into its absence,
The accumulated weight of things I almost became,
The wanting is the sign the living part is still here,
The choosing is the whole answer to every question...