what pain are you willing to sustain?

What pain do you want to sustain? What pursuit is important enough to you (what do you want enough) that you can endure the pain associated with it? What are you willing to risk in order to pursue what you love?

I would like the pain of pushing myself to write more and more words. Two months ago I started waking up earlier to write at least 500 words a day. That quickly started to feel like far too little, so I made it a thousand words every morning. If I want to be a writer, I need to increase that challenge any time it stops feeling difficult. My average word count for 120 days of showing up at 4am is well below a thousand words a day. I need to step up my game. The challenge of pushing myself harder is so worth it because that means I’ve grown and am growing. In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about finding that sweet spot on a sliding scale between comfort and pain that keeps you growing. We have to be challenged just enough to continually improve.

I think I could handle the pain of rejection over and over again if it meant that I was putting myself out there enough to get noticed. I don’t create enough to actually submit my work to publishers, galleries, or contests. Every time I think about submitting to a short story contest or something of that ilk, I’m always disappointed by the backlog of old work that I have. I need to be creating new content. I love the reward of pushing through ideas and watching the word count grow. I love when a character becomes so solidified that you can hear exactly how they would say something, and the characters can practically write the scenes themselves.

I’m willing to suffer trolls and negative feedback because that means my ideas have landed on someone. That means someone is listening. That means I’ve said something substantial enough for someone to disagree. That means I’ve been putting myself out there and haven’t been safe or neutral. I got my first troll on Twitter a few weeks ago. I haven’t posted much and I don’t have many followers (nor do I follow many people), but some random person felt the need to question my post, which means that they read it, disagreed, and wanted to engage. The guy was a douche and a career troll, so that made it very easy not to take it personally or to engage with him back. But that means I made it onto someone’s radar.

I’m even willing to risk the embarrassment of going through the old journal I just dug out of my nightstand if it means sparking some kind of story. I’m not even sure how back it goes, but it certainly hasn’t been touched in years. I’m a little afraid to open it, but I would like to start using a physical journal again. It’s a nice leather bound one, and there’s something about ritual and tangible artifacts that make the act of creating feel so romantic. But I’m not as free on the written page as I feel I can be in a password protected digital document. There’s no security on paper. Not that I have anything at all to hide, but as a creative it feels risky to do the necessary thing of being honest and vulnerable.

I’m also willing to put myself out here on my blog every week, even if no one reads it. It can be disheartening to show up and do the work if it feels like it doesn’t matter yet. But if the work is important enough to you, you do it even if there’s no audience. Whatever your passion is, you have to love the doing, not just the results. You have to take the process and the leg work and being a nobody for a while and love the work enough to still keep doing it every day even if there’s no reward for it.

My wish for everyone is that they find that one thing that lights them up enough to endure the nitty gritty even if it doesn’t result in the warm and fuzzy. What makes you show up every day, even when no one is looking? What pain are you willing to sustain?

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