showing up
“You know how everyone’s always saying, ‘Seize the moment’? I don’t know, I’m kinda thinkin’ it’s the other way. Like the moment seizes us.”
Someone recently reached out to me to ask “What inspires you to write, and how do you get the inspiration to write consistently?”
I wish I could have given them an answer that would have been impressive and poetic, something like ‘I find inspiration from every corner of the universe’ or ‘Inspiration comes to me like lightning in the middle of a sunny day.’
But the only answer I had, and the honest answer, was “If I’m lucky, I’m inspired by stuff that happens day-to-day — but most of the time I’m forcing myself.”
I wish that I was blessed with the ability to have a constant stream of ideas, and that writing was something that came easily and effortlessly. But in reality, writing is hard.
It’s not hard from a mechanical viewpoint — as Stephen King said, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and paragraphs become chapters. But it’s everything else about writing that can seem daunting. The pressure to find an idea (something no one else has thought about!), the effort to write it well enough that it won’t immediately be thrown away by anyone reading, the fear of backlash or just plain disgust from your readers (who at this stage of my life are mostly my friends).
Most weeks, writing can be hard and scary to even think about it.
So most weeks, I try my best to not think about writing.
I just show up.
Showing up means a couple of different things in my mind.
Firstly, showing up every day to whatever happens in my life.
Stephen King has a ton of great quotes in his book “On Writing”. When talking about finding inspiration and ideas, he wrote:
“Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
Most of my writing arises from the events and thoughts that happen to me daily. There’s nothing special — I have a very normal and mundane life. If you look at my last few articles, they have each been inspired (in this exact order) by a one-off conversation with friends, an F1 race, packing my things to move out, and one excruciatingly boring weekend.
What I’ve learned about inspiration — at least, for myself — is that ideas don’t come as a nice package where the article just streams from your fingertips like you’re a word bender, effortlessly typing on your keyboard to make an article that will blow collective minds.
For me, articles are usually an idea that’s been on my mind for a few weeks. I initially don’t think too much about it, but then there will be more small events that remind me of that initial idea. I’ll think about the idea of home, and then watch a movie about someone coming home, or read an article about someone leaving their home. Or I’ll be thinking about how to deal with rejection, and I’ll hear my friend’s story about being rejected, or I’ll get rejected myself for something I wanted.
I’m just a vessel, and I take the ideas I can get whenever they show themselves.
My writing is not a nice neat package. If I had to describe it, it’s more of a mosaic of all the small things that happened to me, the small details of the stories my friends have told me, or the small miracles (or catastrophes) that happen every day.
I just show up every day (even if that means rolling out of bed and living the same life I do every day) and I note down any small thing that I think I can write about. And at the end of the week, I sit down and see what ideas might be able to turn into something more.
And so that leads us nicely into the second way I define ‘showing up’.
In 2018, John Mayer improvised a song live with Zane Lowe on an Apple Music interview. He picked up a guitar and proceeded to seemingly pull chords and lyrics out of thin air, and said:
“If you’re not Ouija Boarding immediately, you’re wasting time. You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it.
What he meant by Ouija Boarding — in the context of the interview — is just trying to sing lyrics, even if they don’t make sense or even rhyme. But you have to keep forcing it because otherwise, you’ll never hit a breakthrough.
That has become my second definition of showing up: literally, showing up.
If I didn’t write every week, most people would not care. Most wouldn’t even notice. But writing every week is much more for me than it is for anyone else.
It’s about forcing myself to sit down every week and think about everything that’s happened in the past seven days. It’s about remembering every story told to me, every topic of conversation, every Tiktok I watched. It’s retracing my steps for the week and seeing which ideas came up where, and seeing what might work. It’s taking all of these small details and ideas and trying to make an article that is coherent and makes some sense.
Most weeks, I don’t think I succeed at this. Most weeks, I feel like I just regurgitate a jumble of words and press “Publish” with my fingers crossed. Most weeks, I’m forcing myself to write, even if I don’t feel particularly inspired.
But most weeks, all I have to do is show up. I’m not demanding myself to be churning out great articles every week. I’m not demanding myself to write to a minimum word count. I’m just asking myself if I can show up every week, write something, and post it.
And so, even if I’m forcing it, even if I’m faking it, even if I’m Ouija Boarding it, I do my best to show up.
Most of the time, that’s all that matters.
To close, there are two additional good things about showing up.
The first good thing about showing up is that it helps you deal with fear. The fear doesn’t go away, but when you’ve made up your mind to show up no matter what, you start to care less about whether people will hate or love what you make (because sometimes, even you don’t love what you make).
When you’re just focused on sending something out, on pressing the Publish button every week, you realize the only thing stopping you from doing that is you. It’s not the haters, or the naysayers, or the people-who-follow-you-on-Instagram-who-you-never-interact-with-but-you-would-like-to-impress-them. It’s just you.
The second good thing about showing up is that it applies to almost everything in your life. When I was surfing regularly, there would be a ton of mornings where I felt too lazy to get up. But I’d tell myself to just go to the beach first, and then if I didn’t want to I could just go home. 100% of the time, I would end up actually going out into the water. Showing up is half of the battle — sometimes it’s the most difficult part. And this applies to a ton of stuff outside of writing and surfing.
Don’t feel like working out? Show up to the gym, then go home if you want.
Don’t feel like you’re being a good friend? Just show up for them when you can, and do your best.
Don’t feel like you’re being productive? Just show up to work and try to make it to the end of the day.
You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be the best. At least try to show up. Try to be present. Try to be there when someone needs it the most. Try to make something from nothing. Most of it will be crap, most of it will be forgettable. Doesn’t matter, just keep showing up.
I’ll leave you with one final quote, from Stab Magazine: “Extraordinary accomplishments come from doing ordinary things for extraordinary periods of time.”
Show up. Do your best. Then show up the next day. Repeat.
