Welcome to my second blog post! ( You can check out the first here) and we are getting into, the fear of fucking up. You’ll find this across the way from perfectionism, just left of ‘I’m not quite ready to get started yet’ and of course in the general vicinity of the old classic ‘maybe one day’.
The last couple of months have been so exciting but also so terrifying. I have had imposter syndrome and then imposter syndrome about having imposter syndrome. I have found myself having trouble with the constant fear of fucking up.
This idea of me starting this magazine is absolutely insane. I have no idea what I am doing.
The hope that this will turn into a ‘must read’. That the readers will get a thrill of excitement when they see a new article is coming out and can’t wait to get their eyes on it. This hope seems so far away that it almost feels too ludicrous to keep going and that I may as well give up now.
But, ( thank god there’s a but right? Or this would be super depressing) if you read any book of anyone that’s ever achieved anything, it starts the same way. Lots of self-doubt, lots of moments of questioning everything, and quite often a healthy dose of fucking up. It’s never an overnight success, people don’t build stuff in a day ( like Rome). It’s an accumulative affect of choosing to keep doing the thing over and over again.
I initially thought that once you do something that scares you once, it gets easier. But that isn’t what I have found. Especially if the things you’ve tried in the past haven’t gone as you thought they might. In fact, it just feels like I am just hyper aware of what happens when you fuck up because of all the scary things I have chosen to do previously and their varied outcomes.
The things don’t get less scary, I may get into a better practise of approaching them, and I may get better at learning from my fuck ups. But at the end of the day, it’s a constant series of choices. You choose to do that thing and you choose to continue to do that thing.
Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained.
No Sacrifice, No Victory (yup, the Whitwicky family moto from Transformers).
No Guts, No Glory.
You get the drift. It takes a little somethin’ somethin’ to keep choosing to keep going despite knowing that it may all go terribly wrong.
It’s really bloody hard.
All in all, I am so glad that this magazine is finally up and running even if it’s slightly haphazard and I’m not really sure what I am doing. I wanted to share this little slice of my brain to keep you in the loop of this whole’ starting a magazine’ thing. But also in the hope that if anyone reading this is also struggling to keep choosing to keep doing the thing, you are not alone. I’m in that scary boat too.
