Figuring it out v.1

Well, not really. I mean, sort of?

For one, I need to figure out why this app keeps crashing and what I need to do to get it to stop. Not a great look for a self-professed genius programmer.

The other thing is: I've realized how much of my life looks like "poor impulse control" to anyone who isn't me. Constantly running headlong into things that I have no business attempting.

• Acting? Sure - I've never done it before, but let's fuckin' go!
• Prop making? Sure - How hard could it be?
• Sound design/engineering? I have no idea what these lights mean, but I'll give it a shot!
• Directing? Well, I won't say "no" but... fuck it, we ball
• Buying a house? I definitely can be trusted with that level of commitment and responsibility!

Getting ready for a convention, doing my makeup, and just randomly painting shit on my face like I know what I'm doing. Gluing LEDs to myself because I think it'll look the way I want it to look. Cooking and just throwing whatever I think might be tasty into a soup (including maple flavoring?)... But the cosplay analogy super works for this. Same as painting. Same as sound design. Same as any creative or artistic endeavor.

The thing is, whenever I do my makeup for a show, or for a cosplay, I inevitably hate it for the first 99% of the process. I look in the mirror and think "this doesn't look anything like what I wanted it to look like" or "I have no idea what I'm doing" and almost always very nearly back out. The only thing that keeps me going is the belief that I think this every time, but every time it winds up coming out really cool and I love it. While directing my first show last year, every day was a question of "did I do this right? Do I seem like I know what I'm doing? Did I do good?" But in the end I just... I dunno... I just sat down and did it. I figured it out as I went. I embraced the "fuck it, we're doing it live" chaos and body surfed my way along that wave of happenstance until I got to shore. Maybe a little banged and scraped up, but I made it there.

And for me, that's my trick. And that's where the "poor impulse control" appears. Because: it's not that I necessarily have poor impulse control, and it's not that I necessarily have any impulse control to begin with either. It's just that... When I find myself between a rock and a hard place, I go for it. When I find myself in a situation I clearly have no experience being in, I just have to shrug and do the thing. When I feel like running away and hiding, when I feel like retreating back to the safety of the known and hiding in a hole until the scariness passes by... Those are the times that I've learned I can only make it through one way: by throwing myself entirely into the task at hand. I need to put myself so deep in the much that, in the words of Macbeth:

I am in [this shit] Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

I need to go so far in that it's gunna suck as much to run away as it is to just shut up and do the fuckin' thing... Because that's when I forget that I don't know how to do the fuckin' thing, I just do the fuckin' thing! And it is through the "doing of the thing" that I ultimately either learn how to "do the thing" or that the knowledge of how is completely irrelevant when once "the thing" has been done. And that brings me a certain sense of unbridled and unfounded confidence. After all: if I can do the thing, what can't I do?