Entry № 17 · Plate xvii
On StartingAnything worth doing is worth doing badly — just begin.
You do not have to be great to start. You have to start to become great.
The explanation
Perfectionism is procrastination wearing a tie. The first draft, the first run, the first conversation will be bad. They are supposed to be bad. The badness is the tuition you pay for the right to one day do it well. People who insist on starting well never start at all.
The story
For most of my twenties I told anyone who asked that I was 'a writer who hadn't started yet.' The truth was that every sentence I produced sounded clumsy the moment it hit the page, and rather than tolerate the discomfort, I would close the laptop and reorganize my bookshelf again. I had notebooks full of first paragraphs and no second ones.
On my thirtieth birthday, half-drunk on cheap wine and a hard conversation with an honest friend, I made a small, embarrassing promise: I would publish one essay a week on a blog no one read, for one year, no matter how bad it was. The first essay was genuinely embarrassing. So was the second. So was, if I'm honest, the twelfth. But somewhere around week eighteen I noticed I could hear my own voice on the page for the first time.
Around week thirty a stranger emailed to say a piece had made her cry on the train. In the last month of the year a small magazine asked to publish one. None of that would have happened if I had waited to be good. The bad essays weren't obstacles on the path to the good ones. They were the path. I still keep the first one, untouched, as a monument to the only thing that ever really mattered: I started.
