Morning Pages: March 25th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of partial lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

I'm getting kind of unnerved and unhinged at the lack of progress I'm making on my project. It's been two whole months since I've committed to starting, and four whole days (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday) basically continuing to do research on just getting some fucking thing out the door. Meanwhile other people are happily paying for templates and cobbling something together, and shipping just fine. I feel sick to my stomach that this all happened and this is how I have spent my time. Maybe if I just committed to doing something smaller, something easier, something more familiar, like read another fucking book and write another blog post, I wouldn't stake my entire future on some words on a screen.

But I feel like I can't quit now. I've put in so much effort just learning all the crap I need to do for this project, that if I stop now all that will have been for nothing. The only way to solidify that knowledge is to ship something and continue to use it, and I haven't shipped that something yet. People have also mentioned why I don't take the easier path of using various managed solutions, instead of biting off the entire head of lettuce in one go, and I just...can't. I don't know how to explain it, but I'm more terrified of making progress in one direction and failing than moving extremely slowly in a direction I feel is the final, right way to do things. I think it's the fear of regret.

So I'm trapped. And maybe the whole Churchill "if you find yourself marching through hell, keep marching" thing is true and I'll actually come out unscathed more or less from the other side. I just can't imagine that happening though, everything seems really bleak and dark somehow.

Maybe I just didn't get a good night's sleep last night. Yesterday was the first night I slept without my phone in, well, years, and relied on IFTTT and my Google Home in order to record my sleep log. Maybe it's the weather and how it keeps raining, which I should be happy about because it hopefully means less viruses on surfaces outside and in the air. Maybe it's because I ran out of that delicious Trader Joe's frozen mango and I'm too afraid to go back into the store to get more, or maybe it's because the stock market crashed and I had some amount of savings there and now I kind of don't (haven't exited though).

I'll keep hammering at this, and hopefully at least I'll be able to learn a new thing or another. In the meantime, I should bleed off this excess worry / energy by exercising, eating breakfast, and meditating.