Mt. Molehill
I have a habit of making mountains out of molehills I'm trying to climb. Exaggerating the difficulty of whatever it is I'm attempting to accomplish allows me to boost my ego by patting myself on the back for embarking on a Monumentous Quest for Enlightenment and Fulfillment and Passion.
Conveniently, it simultaneously allows me to protect my ego by implanting the idea in my mind that it's okay to fail, after all this was not a stroll in the park, but a Monumentous Quest for Enlightenment and Fulfillment and Passion. Would you have blamed Ulysses, Jason or Perseus if at some point they just said "Fuck this" and found a nice cosy Greek town to settle down in?
Treating something as no big deal strips it of its aura and makes it less daunting, but it also deprives it of some of Glory's sheen and places responsibility for the shirking of responsibility squarely in your lap. It's odd, but sounds about right and resonates with my own experiences.
The question remains though, is whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish really a Mountain? Or is it just a molehill I'm talking up? Let's take writing a novel as an example. Thousands of novels are written everyday. Finding online communities of writers opened my eyes to just how many writers are out there, and the reason why is obvious to me.
Writing has virtually zero barriers to entry. It requires no collaboration. It requires a negligible capital investment. It's indulgent and masturbatory at times (God, I hope that's not too ironic...). My writing here is proof of this, as I write these thoughts on my phone while walking around a park.
Compare this to playing music: you need an instrument and you need to practice before you actually play music. Admittedly, the barriers are not astronomically high here either, especially if you want to play punk rock, but I digress.
Because writing can be produced with zero effort, it can feel like a non-event, on par with opening the refrigerator or farting. Hence, if it is being used for one's own validation, it has to be talked up. The more it is talked up, the greater the validation as I described above.
This says nothing of the quality of writing. As pretentious as I might sound, those same online communities are brimming over with truly terrible writing by authors who genuinely believe their work is the product of genius. They gave me nightmares that I might be one of 'them'. Exceptional work is truly... Well, the exception.
Herein is the dilemma. That though writing is no big deal, good writing kind of is for the less talented. And as my ample use of the thesaurus reminds me, I fall into this category.
I think I just have to make peace with the likelihood that I'm producing drivel and hope that it can be polished into a good piece of work. I decided to start publishing my musings on this same vein: to stop coating writing in all this Glory and just write. Reduce my barriers to enter. Maybe being a terrible or (horror of horrors) a mediocre one isn't the end of the world.
