I made a mistake...

If you have listened to any episode of the average podcast, you would know that there is a very "aspire to inspire the desire that you require" quality to it, albeit masked by my recurrent disclaimer (I'm not telling you what to do, I'm telling me what to do and hoping it helps you). However, in real life, I suck at taking my own advice, like, mega-suck. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I completely ignore all my good instincts to push forward and "just do it", but my mind is a minefield, and one wrong step could set off a chain reaction of self-doubt, negativity, and ultimately, I just quit.

A friend of mine was putting together this poetry anthology and he wanted me to be featured in it. He even gave me two spots as against the one spot he gave everybody else; he also gave me a deadline. In the beginning, I was so stoked! I was conceptualizing the poems in my head and I was really excited as they seemed to be coming to life fairly quickly. However, my brain did one of those minefield things and I didn't write. Nothing felt right; the concepts in my head began to seem more and more stupid to me, and I lost my excitement. I disappointed someone who put his trust in me because I was overthinking.

Today I put up a really special post on Instagram. It was a mashup of two songs, and more importantly, it was the first time I was really putting my music out there. Don't get me wrong, I have posted snippets of me singing on the interwebs before and it was not that big of a deal to me, but this was the first time I was doing it with the self-proclaimed title of "content creator". Roughly 30 minutes after the post went up, I asked someone who is reaaallly close to me to listen to it and she did, but she did not have a positive reaction to it. I will not bore you with most of the details of the conversation but I will tell you this. I asked her if she thought I should take it down and she said, "if you don't feel good about it, take it down". To the average person, this may have been really good advice, but in this sense, I am notsoaverage (this is why this is a blog post and not a podcast episode). I never truly feel good about my work. When I put something out there, at first I feel this incredible rush, sort of like a flood of dopamine to my brain, and I feel so great. Then I listen to it again, and again, and again until I have picked apart every single element of it and convinced myself why it is terrible.

If I am to be completely honest with you, this is my biggest character flaw.

I took down the video.

I realize now as I write this that I probably shouldn't have, but I did, and now it may become incredibly difficult for me to put myself out there in that way again.

The best & worst part about this lock-down is that I have all this free time to introspect, to examine my flaws, and to try to fix them.

I know the theory. I guess now it's time to act.