These are not stories.

What the fuck do you write when you don’t know what to write but you know you should write something? It’s the only way you will get better at writing. Put one foot in front of the other. Put one word after another. The brain is frozen, paralyzed by fear of not knowing what to do, paralyzed by the fear of rejection. What am I writing? Is this a story? Is it poetry? An essay? Utter nonsense? Will this really help me? Somehow it will. I have to believe it. Writing is a muscle. Just like the body’s muscles, the writing muscle needs to be exercised. You know those mornings when the alarm wakes you and you hit snooze for thirty minutes. You are still asleep and you can feel the fatigue you will feel all day. You don’t have the energy to open your eyes. But you need to get up and exercise. They tell you to start simple and easy. Nothing feels simple or easy, but you have to start somewhere. So you decide to do jumping jacks. Not a lot, just to get the heart pumping a little bit more than it usually does. Sixty jumping jacks. One per second. You don’t want to do them so you just start and you struggle through it. You’re winded after ten and dread having to do another fifty. You want to stop and collapse onto the floor and crawl back into bed. You realize you kept going and you’re halfway through. You hate it. You’re miserable. But you’re gonna keep going. It’s only one fucking minute of exercise. Surely, you can handle that. Even if your brain can’t, your body can. Moan and groan, but keep going. Ten more to go. Eyes shut because you already feel dizzy and flustered. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. You have such a shit attitude about this whole thing, and you know it. And you want to spite the voice in your head, so you keep going. Sixty one, sixty two, sixty three, sixty four, sixty five. Okay, that’s good. You pushed yourself more than you wanted. It’s not a lot, but it’s a lot for you. You should be proud you did something when you didn’t want to do it. And you did more. It’s for your own benefit. It’s productive. You don’t feel like a strongman from one minute of jumping jacks. But you know that every set of jumping jacks you do will get easier over time. Slow gains. You know that getting good at anything takes time and effort. You keep pushing yourself. You build muscles and exercise them and they get stronger. You continue to moan and groan. But you’ll look back and realize one set of jumping jacks is now a breeze. Hell, you do five times the amount just to warm up before an hour-long, full-body workout! One word after another. One stupid word, another stupid word. Strings of words become sentences become paragraphs become chapters. Every jumping jack helps. Every nonsensical word helps. You don’t see it yet but you will one day.

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