For me, it was writing. I have always despised writing.
As Steven Pressfield says in The War of Art, “There’s a secret real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
That’s what frightened me the most: sitting down, staring at a blank screen with that cursor blinking at me, unable to get the ideas from my head onto the screen. I’ve had many nightmares where this happened.
When I got accepted to Praxis, I knew month 2 of the program entailed writing a blog post a day. This was something I dreaded for well over a month.
If you were told to do the one thing you hated the most for 31 straight days, what would be your reaction?
However, I knew I would have to do it one way or the other, so I buckled down and did what Pressfield said was the hardest part. I sat down to write.
I spent hours on that first post: two the night before, and three the day of the deadline, just struggling to find the words and present them in a way people could connect with. It wasn’t perfect, but I shipped it out anyway. Getting over the fear of other people seeing my work and judging it is by far the biggest hurdle I’ve had to get over.
This stressing about having to present something at the end of each day went on for a few days, but I was learning all the while.
It took one post to change the way I thought about writing. In that piece I opened up and let myself become vulnerable to others, saying here, this is me and this is how I feel, writing a piece that only I could’ve written.
People don’t want you to fake it in your writing. They want the real you, open and exposed for them to get an inside look at what makes you tick.
I did that with this post. I went and opened up about how I truly felt. This piece got the most positive feedback of anything I have published, because it was open and honest.
What scares me now is that I’m starting to lose my hatred for writing. Last night I was awake from 1:30–3:00 writing more than 1500 words, which is something I would never have dreamed about doing before this challenge.
If I can get over the fear of the thing I hate the most, what else am I capable of?