Now

It is becoming unreal how quickly the days fly by when I look at them in hindsight. It truly felt like the last two weeks went by without much progress being made on any of my goals. But as I’ve said in my Subtle Progress note, I’m slowly building up the changes necessary for me to become completely different a year or two from now.

Or that’s just the cope I tell myself.

If there’s one thing I can say, it’s that I’m working at the writing of Remember Rain and the learning of Japanese, even if it’s slow and sometimes unnoticeable. My shift from kanji meaning study to simply learning vocab in tandem with reread, repeat, rewatch is one that I keep questioning myself on. But it is working. I notice and question new words more often, to the point that after three or four days of feeling like I have no idea what something means, I suddenly have an almost unconscious feeling of the word. Granted, it could simply be recency bias, but I think that might just be how learning—and maybe life—works.

Even if you build up and know things at a certain moment, after enough time, some of that starts to decay and disappear. That confrontation with the impermanence of everything becomes a reminder that I need to keep fighting on.

While writing Remember Rain on a little road trip, I had a mini epiphany while struggling to put words onto the page in less-than-ideal conditions. I kept having to confront the feeling that I didn’t know what I was doing. And because I didn’t know, that became my excuse to not spend another moment of my time thinking or really writing another word that came to mind. In essence, it is overthinking.

It was then that I realized THAT was the problem my whole life seemed to revolve around. No, it was not simply overthinking. It was that I wanted to know before attempting to write. I wanted a justification. I wanted a divine spark to tell me, to push me to create. I wanted a sort of reason—or really the feeling of knowing what I wanted to say or write.

A recent example that made this problem extremely clear to me was Re:Zero Season 4, Episode 16. Without spoiling anything, it showed me an expression of the problem at hand. You can accomplish great feats and even change the world, but not necessarily because there’s something inherently special about you. Rather, it’s because you decide to put in effort no matter the obstacle or circumstance presented. Through all of the suffering, the idiocy, the embarrassment, the defeats, can you continue to keep trying without any reason for it all to pan out?

By the end of all those efforts, after enough time has passed, others—and especially yourself—can look back and see just how far you’ve come.

I teared up watching this episode, as it really was a culmination of not only what Re:Zero as a story truly represents, but also the learnings about myself throughout my life and the simple answer in order to reach any of my goals. To simply try. Try even if it hurts. Try even if the world says you’re wrong. Try even if you’ve lost everything and everyone around you.

In application to my own life, I must try even a little to make progress. Or, perhaps more accurately, I shouldn’t try merely to make progress. I should try for the sake of trying. To simply embody the person who is capable of all these accomplishments I want for myself, even if I don’t feel or see any signs that I have what it takes. To already live the life I claim to want to become.

With that, I need to put in my necessary doomer caveat that you need to be “realistic.” Just because I wrote one word today does not mean I can finish writing a book by the end of the month or even the year. What it does mean, though, is that I need to learn to be both okay and not okay with the little progress I make. Okay in the sense that I am progressing toward the things that truly matter to me, but not okay with mediocrity—or at least willing to be truthful about the person I am.