The hardest part of writing and how I've turned it into my strength

The hardest part of writing happens pretty much every time I face a blank page. Sorry to say, it doesn't get easier, at least in my care, because the biggest hurdle I face in my writing is knowing that what I write will never be exactly what someone else would have written on the same topic. The interview questions I ask, whether they're about period sex or raising a transgender child, will never be exactly the same as someone else's questions (although I have interviewed people who've been asked a variation of almost identical questions their answers inevitably start to sound the same, and that is something I try to steer clear of these days and interview people who are not oversaturated by press).

My point, though, is, that sometimes the fear and doubt embedded in that truth leaves me staring at my screen, stricken, utterly sure that, since what I will ask or write or reveal is different from what someone else would, it's lesser than. That is a battle I will probably always face, because even when I think I have a great idea, even when I'm audacious enough to pitch it to one of the most famous newspapers in the world, I still get nervous. I still wonder, what the hell am I doing? I'm wondering that right now, in fact. Is admitting that I am often terrified of getting past word one going to diminish my the perceived reputation of the writing classes I'm teaching?

What I've come to realize is that the truth here is inescapable. I will never be another person, so I will never be able to write like someone else would. I can learn the most I can about my craft, I can study publications zealously to get a sense of what they want. I can learn from failed pitches and study the ones that succeeded to figure out what works. I can constantly be on the lookout for aspects of my life, or other people's lives, or pop culture, that might warrant an exploration on the page.

These days, a vast amount of what I do is research, brainstorming, figuring out what topics people will want to read about. Sometimes, readers surprise me. My profile of what it's like to work at Philadelphia porn company HotMovies.com is currently the most-read story on Philadelphia City Paper's website. I don't get paid more for that, but it makes me feel good that I chose well and did justice to the topic given my relatively small word count.

One of my keys to facing this could-be-debilitating fear is to simply charge right into it. To say, essentially, okay, I can only write as "me," so what about me is unique? That too is audacious; it runs counter to everything I've absorbed about being meek and quiet and patient to do the exact opposite, to look around and say, how ridiculous and crazy and weird is my life, and how can I laugh at and learn from and exploit that? I've accepted that fact that people might look at me like I'm crazy when I admit that I have over 1,000 Google Alerts, and that's okay. So what?

The truth is, life is crazy, in big and small ways. So that's where I go. Not that every story I write is "crazy," hopefully, but that they all stem from some interest of mine (or in some cases, my editor's). They all are part of me and they are never going to emerge the same way they would if someone else covered them. So while I write about sex and dating, I've also made babies and body image and weight and beauty and books (sometimes beauty and books) and hoarding my beats. I've followed my "weird" passions and quirks and done my best to encourage others to do so. I've trusted myself to admit hard truths because I believe anyone that cares about me as a person will know that honesty is not a weapon or a curse, but a valued skill. I've embraced the fact that while other people may relate or have similar stories to share, they will never write a short story or essay or conduct an interview exactly how I have. That's simply the truth, and I can lament it or I can make it work for me.

As such, I've let myself acknowledge that sometimes other people will say or write what I wanted to express better than I could have, and that's okay too. Accepting that I can try my best, pursue my passionate quirks, and still sometimes fall short of the mark, and here I mean my own standard for my work, is part of getting better at it. I've been sitting on some ideas, some for months, telling myself I should "wait" because they aren't fully cooked yet, that I need more time to ruminate. So, like the neurotic person I am, almost every day I sit down to make one of my many to do lists, and wind up writing those ideas down. "Pitch _____." The ideas gnaw at me, distracting me from whatever the task at hand is, and the longer I ignore them, the more they haunt me. Instead of simply taking the time to pitch them and see what kind of response I get, I've too often let them stay in my head because I let that fear win. I have to pretty much tell myself that, sometimes out loud, to get past all those voice telling me things like, no, don't try to interview that person, because you don't know everything that's ever happened in their field, and you'll sound stupid. So, I'm posting this today partly for me, and partly for anyone reading this who needs a little encouragement. Write, pitch, blog, or whatever your preferred artistic medium is. Go for it, because write will never be exactly what someone else would have written. It will be yours, and it will be special, because you are.

It's a busy time right now but when I've had a few minutes, like I did this weekend to sit outdoors in Princeton, I'm reading Rising Strong by Brené Brown, a book about failure (there's even a chapter titled "Composting Failure"), because I've faced my share of it. It's one of those books that, for me, the mere reading of it helps give me confidence, helps remind me that I'm not my worst sentence, my biggest mistake, my greatest failure, although those are part of me too. I'm those along with all the positive things I'm proud of, and everything in between. I'm myself, which is not always who I like or love or want to be, but I'm who I've got. This is a section I highlighted (yes, one of the joys of buying books is you can write in them; it's not something I do that often, but sometimes I feel a book just needs that added emphasis, if only to sear the concepts into my mind), that I thought you might appreciate.



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ADD, Vyvanse, writing, fear and me

I wrote my second piece for Medium, about magical thinking, Vyvanse, writing and fear. It's called "Would ADD drug Vyvanse make me a better writer? I wish." If you liked it, I'd love it if you'd hit "Recommend" at the bottom. Sometimes labors of love help you unlock something important. I'm hoping that's the case with me.

The hardest and easiest part of writing

The more I write—and, more importantly, the more I don't write—the more I realize that for me the best and worst thing, the hardest and easiest thing, about writing, for me, is the realization that nobody else will write exactly the same thing I will (or would), and vice versa. Ideally, this should be liberating; my voice is unique and special and what I have to say is something only I can do.

The converse, though, is what almost always keeps me from writing. I think: someone else would write it differently, which therefore means someone else would write it better. And then I stop. Or I "research," which is really just another way of saying "procrastinate." Or I wait so long that the idea is no longer timely. Or I purchase a research study with the hope that by investing in my writing, I will therefore push myself to actually write, and then let it expire. I don't trust in that uniqueness, that vision, those glimmers of ideas. I don't trust them because I don't trust myself. I imagine how easy it would be if I were any of those other writers, any of those other people. If I were anyone else.

I am combing through all my belongings as I prepare to move in 31 days, and I see so many examples of dreams I never imagined being fulfilled that have now come true. I used to subscribe to Penthouse, and then I got a job and kept it for seven years at Penthouse Variations. Yes, I still have those magazines from 2000 and 2001. I used to want to see my books on shelves, and now, while I haven't written them, my name is on the spine and cover; my choices make up the contents, and while they may not be that easy to find at Barnes & Noble, they are there. In high school, back when The Village Voice was free, my friend A. used to bring it back to Teaneck when she went into Manhattan for music school, and we'd look at the ads on the back page. Never ever back in high school did I think I'd write for that paper, or that if I did, it would be read by international audiences, or that many years later when that seems almost like a dream, people I greatly admire would know who I am because of it.

I meet so many people with brilliant ideas, read writers whose work I want to devour. In that same ideal world, their words should inspire me to create some of my own. Instead, I keep going back to that scared place where I'm so afraid of rejection that I only let myself write those words in the wee hours or frantically type notes into my phone or scrawl them on random pieces of paper I will lose. Part of why I'm moving is the hope that I will banish some of those fears, that with someone else relying on me I will be forced to step up, if only to not let my partner down by not being able to make rent. More so, I want to feel like I did everything I could, that I pushed myself, that I saw the ideas that come to me fairly frequently through to fruition. This unexpected weekend at home, which I chose rather than going away somewhere much sunnier and more fun, is my chance to start over. Not in 31 days. Now. Hardness and all.

Dear Writing

Dear Writing,

I've missed you, though "missed" sounds woefully inadequate for that sense of longing, of not being myself at all without you. I've missed with you with a ferocious, desperate urgency, the kind that piles on heavier and heavier the longer I go without, the kind that invades every minute of my day I'm without you. That's the irony, though—that there you are, always, waiting for me, available, practically begging me to return to you. I know—too well.

I know you miss me as much as I miss you, and all I can say is, it's not you, it's me. Cliché as that phrase is, it's the truth. It's always me, when we're apart. And fear. Every single time I have ignored you, neglected you, pretended to myself I had nothing to offer, it's always been fear. Fear of not being good enough, fear of nobody reading, fear of everybody reading, fear of gigantic scary edits, fear of rejection. The fear is so big and loud and huge I often forget it's not the same thing as truth, and that the moment I start to release some of my words, to push out all the fear and noise and self-hatred, the surety that starting is futile when you don't know the end the moment you sit down, some of that fear disappears, just a little.

I've been reading this brilliant blog, Momastery, and I love the writing because it doesn't shy away from fear. There's all the fear, right out in the open. It's so easy to do the opposite, and to feel that to be successful you must do the opposite. Nobody wants to buy books or articles from a scaredy-cat, do they? No; instead you must sell yourself, all day, both your books and your ideas, in order to keep getting those checks and keep paying that rent.

It's not just that, though, that has kept me from you. I dream about you, during the day and at night when I'm asleep. I am reminded of you everywhere I look, those titles that sit on blank documents, patiently holding space against all that whiteness. In my head, some of that empty space has been filled in, fleshed out, animated. I know what will happen and "all I have to do is write it down." Ah, if only that were "all" anyone ever had to do. There are so many walls, so many times when that act of filling it on falls flat, doesn't even come close to measuring up to what I'd conjured. I think if I wait—and wait and wait and wait, which really means, procrastinate and live with constant guilt and fear—the answers will come, even though every wise person who's ever written or spoken about writing has concluded the precise opposite: that the only way to write is to sit and bring forth the words.

I know I will probably always be a little afraid of you, even though I also know that so often you are the only thing that can make me happy, or at least, content. Maybe that's what I'm afraid of, deep, deep down. I have had glimmers, hints, signs, of late, that even when I neglect you, you still keep coming through for me, like that Morrissey song, "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get." The acceptance for that story I wrote based on a cabaret show, the excellent interview I submitted to a dream publication but know will likely have to find another home, the "scary" essay that has made anyone I've mentioned its topic to laugh and look at me a little askance, with just the right hint of "you're crazy" to let me know that yes, I'm crazy, and should be sharing the craziness. The rereading those old pieces I'd forgotten about and realizing they still work. The writing workshop and talk and camaraderie. The marveling over a gorgeous sentence in a book that's been tucked away, just for the sake of taking pleasure in the words. The gratitude for all the chances, and second changes. The chunks of minutes I've dared to sneak away with you, but only when I have to be somewhere, or my battery is dying, anything with a shortcut, an off switch, but still, chunks where I got something down because I absolutely could not do anything else any longer.

I hate feeling so estranged from you, hate feeling like a fraud when I say to someone I'm a writer. I hate seeing the moment pass because I was so worried about perfection, that mythical way of being. I am bad at promises; the act of making them seems to kickstart something in me that causes me to immediately rebel and not live up to them, so I won't bother. Just know that I never truly left you; I've always been here, thinking about you, wanting you back. Maybe that's part of the work, the missing and reuniting, the push/pull, the lows with the highs. I'm as bad at mindfulness as I am at promises, but I want to try to do better by you. Starting with this.

Love,
Rachel

I wrote something

I know there are plenty of problems with me, this piece, I know there are always people ready to tell you not to write for free, or not to write about X or Y, but so be it. I'm taking life and writing one day at a time. I have so many things I want to write about, or think I want to write about, and lists upon lists upon lists and clearly, this year has taught me that money is not the motivator, success, approval - I turn those away again and again. I'm trying to change my ways on all fronts, truly, to become someone totally different who I can like and admire, because I have not been someone I like or admire for quite a while. Anyway, just a preface that could go on forever. I'm not proud of myself or my behavior or my faults, but I also, especially this month, have realized that ignoring them and not facing them won't make them go away. Maybe nothing will, but sometimes writing, calling yourself out in public, helps. I'm hoping to write about Cheryl's memorial last weekend, which I've been pondering bigtime. So many things it brings up, about her, about how we are perceived and want to be remembered.

Sometimes I just have to remind myself, on the personal and professional fronts, I can't change the past, and every second I wish I could is a wasted second. I can only live in the now, can only try to live up to my ideals, not anyone else's. I wrote on Twitter that so much of 2011 is, for me, trying to tune out the outside noise, and there's a hell of a lot of it. It's all too easy to get caught up in trying to win other people's approval and breaking out of that bad habit has been tough for me, but I know it's vital. I know I have to work on repairing the damage I've done in the last few years and figuring out how I can meet my goals, and what those goals are. Some are clearer than others, but they are getting clearer. The path to them isn't quite yet, but it will be.

"My Do Not Call List" at The Nervous Breakdown

Modern Love Rejects has launched

My Modern Love rejection, from The New York Times Modern Love section, but of course, goes up tomorrow at Modern Love Rejects. I hesitated over giving permission, even though I'd submitted it, but then I realized, once again, that fear is the ultimate self-sabotage. That even if my essay is foolish and stupid, even if one could say the same about my actions (feel free), I wrote it. I finished it. I tried. The not trying is what makes me despise myself. So, yeah. It makes me feel a little squeamish, but maybe that's a good thing.

So check out the first three Modern Love Rejects, by Samara O'Shea, Kiri Blakeley and Alisa Bowman, and submit your own!

The $90 message I most needed to hear this week

I will be posting more about last night's wonderful reading at Coco de Mer, also about nausea, goodbyes, a mystery missed call, Virgin America and adjusting, here from today's home base in Silverlake. I've been taken in by some very kind friends until I can fly home. Today's project, in addition to hanging out with an adorable baby and a huge to do list of writing I've been neglected in this surreal week, is trying to reconfigure my belongings so they'll fit into my bursting-at-the-seams suitcase.

For now, though, I will tell you that I bought this $90 blindfold, not because I will be getting blindfolded anytime soon, but because it was beautiful and I thought that I, so full of fear in so many matters, needed to own this message. "The only real freedom is freedom from fear." Indeed. It's called the "Bondage for Freedom" Blindfold and Cuff Kit, and indeed, on my receipt, it said "Bondage for Freedom." Fitting as I contemplate both bondage erotica and in the more broader sense, the idea of freedom and how that is a blessing and a curse in so many ways as I try to work on starting over this month on my personal goals and, ironically, trying to remove myself from the world of sex and dating so I can accomplish them with minimal heartache.

But the fear is something I live with every day. Just a week ago I faced a lot of my biggest fears and it wasn't all perfect. It was bittersweet in a lot of ways but I think every time we don't face our fears, we give them a way to control us.



And this is what the bag looks like:



In other news, I'm excited that my book Obsessed: Erotic Romance for Women, out in August, is available for pre-order on Amazon (no cover yet). It'll also have a foreword by the wonderful erotica writer Caridad Piñeiro®, whose new e-book Aztec Gold, just out from Harlequin's digital imprint Carina Press, I'm looking forward to reading on my phone tonight. I'll post a review when I'm done, but I started it and if you like paranormal romance, it's a steal at $3.19.



Official description:

Six months ago, Cynthia Guerrera's lover and fellow archaeologist Rafael Santiago trekked into the Mexican jungle in search of one of the fabled Cities of Gold—and never emerged. Guilty over their parting, Cynthia won't rest until she knows what happened. When the discovery of a conquistador's journal corroborates Rafe's intended path, Cynthia is determined to finally leave the safety of the museum to rescue him, despite the conquistador's dire warnings, and her own traumatic past.

Arriving at a remote village deep in the jungle, Cynthia is both elated and angered to find Rafe alive. But he is far from well, having watched his team be decimated by a bloodthirsty demon-goddess. When Rafe reveals he has been gifted with supernatural powers—powers he plans to use to kill the beast and save his brother, still held captive in the temple—Cynthia must face her own inner demons to fight alongside the man she loves.

35,500 words

My call for Going Down officially ending, but you can get the guidelines for the kinky couples and erotic romance anthologies as well as Best Bondage Erotica 2012 here. Earlier submissions are always preferred as I work on anthologies on a rolling basis.

I am not a creative badass, but I aspire to be

Ever since reading her essay in Marie Claire about her divorce from Elon Musk, I’ve been following Justine Musk, and even though I haven’t delved into her fiction yet, her blog is a constant source of inspiration. Lately I’ve been thinking so much about self-sabotage and what the source of it is for me, because it’s not any isolated incident. It’s a consistent, repeated process, a way of drawing myself back from the brink of success whenever it dares wave at me. I shrink away as if it’s something horrible, as if I don’t deserve it, and I think part of it for me is the fear of being different. That might sound ridiculous because, the fact is, by dint of doing what I do, by having dropped out of law school, a safe, seemingly easy but actually crazy hard path, and then not only writing about sex, but writing about my personal life, exposing truths and my flaws and my body along with my fears, I have chosen an unconventional path.

And I have a love/hate relationship with that path. I have trouble seeing the good in the things I do that are different. I am constantly looking for mentors and people to emulate, and sometimes it takes those very mentors coming to me and asking questions, or telling me they are proud of me, for me to unravel all of that not-so-deep-down self-hatred and realize that the unconventional path is not necessarily a bad one.

It’s confusing in so many ways, not least of which because there are no true roadmaps. I don’t necessarily feel like I’m floundering, but every once in a while I look around and think, “How the hell did I get here?” I really don’t know, and I’m back to being that girl who worked at 2 Park and got in trouble for wearing sneakers or talking on the phone. Sometimes, though I hated that job, I want to be that girl because she was anonymous. Much as I’d like to think I am, I’m not, not really. And that’s at the heart of my discomfort: It will never sound anything but self-aggrandizing to me to say I’m not anonymous. And of course a writer wants to be read; of course…and yet, not always. Not always with the level of scrutiny I am. Not always when the joy of creating something new from a blank page morphs into feeling like I need to defend not just my body of work, but myself. Not always when it creates a very clear disconnect between my “persona” and how I see myself.

Justine Musk writes in a post on how to be a creative badass*:

To produce good work, you need to dive beneath the surface of things. You need to “go there” in a way that we specifically train ourselves not to do in day-to-day life. We believe that if we reveal too much, we’ll expose ourselves as unworthy. Shameful. But it’s shame that keeps us isolated, silent, and disconnected from each other. Part of believing that you have something to say is flying in the face of all that. When you lean into what discomforts you, what scares you, you’re getting to the good, original stuff.

I get that, completely. I feel like sometimes I live and breathe that shame and have no idea how to get rid of it. It’s confusing because on the one hand I am go go go, trying to get people to write about me at, say, my college paper, where I was once rejected as a columnist, where I wrote letters to the editor, where I never ever ever thought I’d be writing about sex for a living. I am happy when I’m at the post office sending out dozens of copies of my new book; that feels healthy, familiar, something I know how to do: give things away. Or, to use a horrible word, marketing. Horrible because that is part of the “persona” and me, well, I like to think of it as creative, as taking a tool that the big people use, like Amazon Prime, and scaling it down to my level.

I am rambling, I’m aware, but my point is that I can see so clearly that there’s a moment, a moment I keep missing, where you have to push that shame aside. Where you have to, in order to succeed, truly not care and not want to be “normal.” And I’m really not sure I know how to do that. I know that I produced some work last year that I’m very proud of, that I went places I couldn’t have gone before. I wrote stories like “Espionage” and “Punching Bag.” Now I’m coming up with all sorts of titles that tickle me so much I flesh them out. I’m getting back to the non-fiction that is what I really want to be doing. But still there is a part of me that is always tempted to just hit delete, not just on this blog, but on this creature I’ve created who I can’t seem to get away from. She’s me but…not entirely. Maybe that’s why one of the people I love spending time with the most is one who’s created a truly new life for herself, one that is so far removed from what I could read about her online it’s like she’s two different people.

I know that there are plenty of people out there, because I know them, I’m friends with them, I’ve gotten to know them, who get that there is more to anyone than what you read about them online, who can make sense of the fact that someone like, um, me, might be fearless in some ways and scared as can be in others. I am working toward getting toward a place where I don’t want to be like everyone else, because even if I did, I think it’s too late for that. I can’t really put the sex writing genie back in the bottle and ultimately I don’t want to. That genie has opened so many doors for me and has also pushed me to grow and embrace this person I never expected to become. I want this to be the year I don’t fuck things up, the one year with no regrets around assignments, no burned bridges, no horror stories. Maybe not everything will work out, but it won’t be because I was so afraid of being different, looked at, noticed, that I didn’t try.

*I don't think it's a coincidence that this quote is from her instruction to "be vulnerable." See my "Be as vulnerable as you possibly can."

Fear, fear, and more fear

Over and over, I keep having this same conversation with people, or variations thereof. I express my sheer, insomnia- and nightmare-inducing terror over my novel, how, except for brief spurts of energy and excitement, I am scared of it. It, like it's a thing that's going to come attack me in the night. That's how it feels at times. So monumental and impossible. I will start to work on it, or even just plot things out in my head, and there is a voice chasing me, telling me why even bother, it's never gonna be any good. What made you think you could write a novel, anyway? Stick with the little leagues. Stay with what you know. This is a fluke. And on and on and on. It's become absolutely ridiculous, especially because when I do work on it, the words, well, if not flow, come out. The characters start to take on life. And even if, say, a scene I wanted to set at Religious Sex on St. Marks can't happen because the store is no longer there, I can revise, rearrange, make it happen somewhere else.

I read a lot of novels this year, both for fun, and thinking I would magically, through osmosis, learn from them how to create my novel. And while I can admire what a lot of these authors do, that hasn't really helped, and in many ways has only served to make me more insecure. I'll never be as good as she is. It must come naturally to her. These thoughts plague me day in and day out. Erotica, I feel like I've largely mastered. I love it, and am excited about all my new projects, but to a large degree it's lost the challenge. Sure, I still get my share of rejections, and I sometimes succumb to the fear and don't send work to awesome anthologies, but for the most part, the ideas for erotica are almost always there. I keep saying things like "if" instead of "when" I finish it. And yet there is a part of me, a tiny part, but a part, nonetheless, that is trying to rise above the fear. It's little things, like wanting my book cover to hang, signed, at The Pump, where I get lunch most days. It's sometimes having to literally envision the cover, or make like my very LA uncle and envision it as a movie, anything to make it more real rather than just words on a page.

Becuase I must say, despite the advance, despite the knowledge that Bantam, part of Random House, aka the big time, hired me for this job, found my writing worthy of not just one, but two novels, when it's just pages on a screen, even a hundred something of them, it doesn't quite feel real. As I proof galleys for Yes, Sir and Yes, Ma'am those books inch closer to being real. There's a different font, there's a layout, there are things that have happened to my word and my authors' words that I didn't do.

Copyblogger has a fabulous article called "The Nasty Four-Letter Word That Keeps You From Writing," (via the brilliant Agent Obvious, who you should be reading if you're a writer) and the very first comment says, in part:

It’s always been clear to me that the more important a writing project is, the more difficult it is for me to complete.

Exactly. It's so comforting to know other people go through this, and yet so easy to think you're the only one.

I've even been afraid of posting about this. I mean, what if I pots about how hard and scary writing a novel is, and then when it comes out, people come back to this post and say, "Well, no wonder her novel sucks, she had such a tough timing writing it." But you know what? Fuck that. I am sick of that way of thinking, that way of living. I am sick of waking up and staring at my laptop not with excitement or even mild interest, but with sheer terror. I'm writing something else for Huffington Post about stopping drinking, and I will also say that this novel terror has extended into other projects, because I tend to have such all or nothing thinking that I feel like if I can't do this, I can't do anything. Of course I know that's not true, and in some ways I have been overproductive in other arenas to make up for my stalling on this.

At the end of the day, I have to accept that my novel will only be as good as I can make it. Not as good as someone else might write their novel or perfect or the best book ever. But it will be something that I would want to read, and hopefully other people will too. It will be something that, while fictional, will help call bullshit on things like this:

(via Feministing)

So thanks for listening, and those who've heard me freak out about this, for putting up with me. Everyone, from my friends and family to my very patient agent and editor, who I fear have now put me in the "problem child" category, have been really supportive. My new deadline is January 14th, and I'm gonna meet it. And next time, I'm gonna take some time and go on a real retreat, away, where I'll be left alone with my thoughts and my computer. That sounds both petrifying and also kindof marvelous. I'm learning, slowly, very very slowly. I don't think fear is something you combat overnight. And I don't think it's all bad. It's only bad if we stay stuck in the same place with it, instead of using it to challenge and propel us forward.

From the Copyblogger article (but there is so much more there that really hits the nail on the head - fear of success, fear of failure, fear of rejection, etc.):

Fear of Mediocrity

Writer Dorothy Parker couldn’t meet a deadline to save her life, because she said for every five words she wrote, she erased seven. Our fear of mediocrity manifests itself as perfectionism, and perfectionism prevents us from simply putting things out there and resolving to get better over time. With that approach, we fail to achieve anything at all.

Right now, if I think about it, I’ll realize that this article is never going to be good enough, no matter how long I spend on it. In fact, what the hell am I doing writing a blog anyway? Is this what I was put on this planet to do?

Then I take a deep breath, and move on to the tips for dealing with the fear of mediocrity.

* No one will ever be perfect, so let it go.
* Action beats inaction every time.
* Accomplishing anything feels better than accomplishing nothing.