Most of the obstacles in my life weren’t external. They were procedural. Internal. A one-person committee skilled at delay, deflection, and convincing arguments for doing nothing. This is a note from inside that room, and a reminder that the only way out is movement.
. . .
I’ve done most everything in my “career” for myself, by myself. This is rewarding in some ways and debilitating in others. With brutal honesty, I can say it’s fairly ineffective, given my personality quirks, habits, and both subtle and overt self-sabotage tendencies. As a creative, this can be even worse. We start a ton of projects. We never lack ideas. Follow-through, on the other hand, seems to live somewhere in the interstice between this dimension and who the hell knows where. “Finishing” something feels almost antithetical to our existence, because nothing creative is ever really finished.
When you’re self-employed or entrepreneurial and prefer to work, and be, alone, you’re accountable only to yourself. Your schedule. Your plans. Your grand intentions. If the day begins on the wrong note, maybe stressing about the same unresolved thing you carried into sleep a few hours earlier, it can trigger a cascade that fractures your presence and drains your freshly charged batteries. Before long, you’re just going through the motions again, defaulting to habit whether it satisfies you or not.
We can pretend to be productive in a thousand different ways. Endless learning. Research. Preparing. In the modern era, there’s no shortage of time-wasting yet engaging, dopamine-satisfying nonsense that looks like progress. If you’re feeling lazy, depressed, apathetic, or unmotivated, a day can easily be thrown away. So can a month. A year. Even a decade. The committee of one rarely challenges you.
Even when you’re excited, inspired, and charged with ideas or momentum, that same committee still finds a way to interfere. It needs to “get real” about something. It asks, “What’s the point?” It slows things down, defers decisions, or quietly reroutes your attention elsewhere. Blame is a favorite tactic, especially when we’ve got emotionally charged outlets available: ex-spouses, kids, politics, fake pandemics. It’s their fault. Health problems are another powerful demotivator. A perfect excuse to put things off forever. But let’s not forget, there is no tomorrow. Life is short. Stop lying to yourself.
Overwhelm has become a staple food in the modern world. It’s always there, just under the surface, ready to kick in instantly. Our always-on, screen-oriented society is hypersensitized and saturated with influencers and emotionally dysregulating inputs. So when the work presses against your comfort zone, and something easier (i.e., bullshit) can be elevated to higher priority, it’s unlikely we’ll stop that mechanism once it’s in motion. Unlikely, but not impossible.
Awareness helps. Self-assessment matters. But there’s something more powerful than either of those, and it’s always available.
BE. DO. MOVE.
The only way past self-imposed or inherited barriers is action. It’s a human superpower. Action gathers scattered energies, psychic, metaphysical, quantum, whatever you want to call them. It dispels mindfuckery almost instantly, whether we’re doing it to ourselves or something external is trying to hijack our mood and feed on frustration, anger, remorse, or regret. Do the thing regardless of what the committee comes up with as a reason not to. Action breaks the pattern, restores flow, and allows correction while you’re actually moving, not frozen in place and staring at a map labeled “plans.”
There are other considerations, closer to the heart and fundamental to our experience as a sentient human animal. These aren’t secondary issues, and they don’t disappear just because we ignore them. You may wish, as I have, that someone were present who truly saw you, accepted your strangeness, and supported you anyway. Not as a surrogate parent compensating for early abandonment, even if that abandonment was unconscious, but as an equal. A partner. A confidant. A grounding force.
Someone pursuing their own long-held vision while remaining open, willing, and invested in co-creating something with you. It’s romantic, sure, but it’s more than that. A lover, mate, or potential life partner, someone with whom you might build a family, biological or otherwise, isn’t just a roommate or a cheerleader.
There’s a reason this impulse exists, even if it’s been aggressively trained out of us. It comes down to the most basic elements of the human experience, and it’s another kind of power. This one is collaborative. It’s energetic. It seeks balance. It wants a more stable and satisfying homeostasis. It’s mirroring. It’s being witnessed.
This dynamic operates throughout the natural world. Early in life, it’s carried by parents, mentors, teachers, instructors, and others who consciously embody a guiding presence. But even the inept, ignorant, or incapable still teach us something. Everything becomes information. All of it is data we use to make decisions, whether it was derived from sources that were generous, honest, painful, or distorted.
The myth of the “empowered individual” is one of the more corrosive ideas to emerge over the last century. It has profoundly reshaped how we think about relationship, family, and marriage. It is destabilizing by design and erosive at a cultural level. Add to this the habit of discarding elders while medicalizing and institutionalizing the young as early as possible.
Worse, we’ve been trained to internalize these conflicts. That brings us back to the beginning. We become our own worst enemy, and that’s not an accident. When a society fragments the family unit, promotes false liberation and fierce independence, and supplies the legal, structural, technical, and technological means to reinforce that narrative, the outcome is predictable.
Loneliness, depression, ennui, apathy, aimlessness, narcissism, moral ambiguity, and moral relativism dominate the mental landscape of many lives. These states are reinforced by corrupt, reality-distorting media systems and large-scale narrative manipulation. There’s no direct way to dismantle those structures, but there is a way to recognize how their lies have been internalized.
There’s nothing wrong with being self-motivated or self-reliant. Resilience matters, as much as we’re capable of cultivating it. No one else can give us purpose or define what’s meaningful. Others can guide or suggest, but regardless of how loud their voices or strong their opinions are, the pursuit of fulfillment is an inside job.
No one wants to be a burden. Anyone acting in an authentic, heart-centered way does not willingly parasitize or drain the material, emotional, or psychological resources of another. But we still have to notice how we burden ourselves through unconscious programs and inherited conditions that siphon energy and poison the well from which motivation and inspiration arise.
Put another way, if there’s any truth to the idea that you’re living inside a reality largely programmed by your own mind, then reclaiming authorship is non-negotiable. Agency and responsibility are engaged every waking moment, and probably beyond. It’s an old theme, but it bears repeating. While you’re conscious, be conscious.
There are no victims here. Only volunteers.
Choose your adventure.
Go all in.
Solvitur ambulando