Just Do It

Just the other day, one of my friends brought up my old blog, Baking Through your Personal Apocalypse. I started that blog almost exactly 10 years ago. I had come back to a very rural, isolated, small community after being away on training for most of the year. When I finally returned, my social circle had voted me out of their graces. The problem was, all my former friends were my co-workers, and with winter closing in, I was on the cusp of having a very, very, very dark stretch of months.

Over a series of difficult months several things finally became clear to me. I was extremely isolated during a very cold winter, and I was depressed. I needed to do something, even though I had very limited options. There was no community gym. I couldn't join a pottery class. Half the time the roads out of my town were closed. I was stuck in the little community regardless of if I wanted to be there.

My other issue was that because I was so upset, I was having trouble focusing long enough to read or write, which had been really healthy things for me to do in my free time. Every time I cracked open a book, my brain returned to thinking about how miserable I was. I would stare at the same paragraph for hours and not get anywhere.

So finally, I decided the following things:

1.) I needed a task I could do with my hands.

2.) But that task had to be something I could do alone and with limited equipment since I had to be able to do it at my house.

3.) I wanted to get back into writing, so I wanted to write about the task.

4.) The task should help me interact with new people.

And ultimately what I decided to do was start a baking blog. I would bake one thing a week, write about making it, and then give it away to someone. This would let me spend time by myself, doing something that had a finite end goal with a final competed product. My thoughts could wander, and it wouldn't be that frustrating. The writing attached with it would be very structured, thereby eliminating the blank page syndrome, and then at the end of it, I would get to interact with someone new in my small, but still somewhat undiscovered community.

I should also add that while I had dabbled in baking, I wasn't particularly good at it.

So, I jumped in. One of the first things I tried to make was a custard pie, which never set, so I just had a top of meringue floating on a sea of unset custard. I didn't always have all the ingredients I needed, so I substituted. Once I made an entire cake out of substituted ingredients. It had the texture of, and tasted like, a Powerbar. When I served it, the only person who liked it was the person who lived and breathed Crossfit. I often was missing a key piece of equipment. It was a long time before someone finally gifted me a rolling pin, so I would use wine bottles.

And much like the treats I baked, the writing about them was less than polished. I took blurry photos with my phone. Nothing was staged. Everything about the entire situation was extremely unpolished.

But, you know what happened? After a year of weekly blog posts, I had met new people, learned a new skill, and started to write again. In fact, after a year of plodding through blog posts, I started to write stories. And eventually, I had enough stories that I self-published an anthology. Some of those stories won low-level awards. I used those stories to get into my MFA program. In my MFA program I made connections in the writing industry, and I ultimately got an agent thanks to my MFA program, and then that agent sold my book to Diversion in a two book deal.

So the reason I'm telling you all this is that you should do the thing you aren't doing because you aren't perfect at it. You should do the thing that is messy and unpolished and sort of cringy because it's okay and normal to not be impossibly good at something.

You are allowed to be bad at something and fail. Forget perfect hair and ring lights and form fitting athleisure wear. I want to see you fighting for your pursuit, even when you're tired and beat down and not so sure of yourself.

Dare to be brave enough to fail gracelessly. Those are the moments that get you where you actually want to be.

I believe in you.