Wednesday 5 June 2013

fear and laziness in port chalmers

(I should probably go right ahead and apologise to you and Hunter S Thompson's ghost for that one. It won't surprise you to know that dad jokes are among my favourite varieties. Bad puns sustain me.)

I just read this Amy Poehler quote on Welcome to Ladyville:

Great people do things before they’re ready. 
They do things before they know they can do it. And by doing it, they’re proven right. 
Because, I think there’s something inside of you, and inside of all of us, 
when we see something and we think, ‘I think I can do it, I think I can do it. But I’m afraid to.’ 
Bridging that gap, doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that, 
that is what life is.

It's funny how you can hear something that you might have known or heard before but all of a sudden sounds completely different because of who is saying it, and how you're feeling. (Although I remain dubious about people saying what life is, unless they are dead and German and had big beards and names that rhyme with Schnietzsche. But we love Amy, and Amy does stuff like hosting SNL that would have me hooked by IV to a keg of tequila and can't have been much less scary for her when she first did it; more, probably, having so much at stake - so let us continue.) Amy, I hear you.

This boutique thing scares me. The stuff I know, and that I know I can do, comes later, when it's set up, and if I had a dollar for every time I've said I wish I could just wake up one day and find it all ready to go, we wouldn't be (jokingly! JOKINGLY!) debating how terrible would it be to put Joe on a diet so flying him up to Auckland doesn't attract an excess baggage fee. (Yes, I hear it.) Debt, even "good" debt like my student mountain and our not-much-bigger-than-my-student-mountain mortgage, freaks me out. Building something on which I'll be judged freaks me out. Having something that's pretty much all mine freaks me out.

I've never been that good at doing stuff that scares me. This is the first of the four blogs I write/have written for that has my real name on it. When I had presentations in my first year of uni, I would always have a drink first; even for my politics class that started at 8am. The only thing that might be scary to other people that isn't scary to me is baring my emotions; unfortunately, doing that isn't going to pay Joe's airfares. (Having said that, would anyone read/buy a book about pregnancy - so far it's just before, but the plan is for it to have a during and an after as well, eventually? Let me know before I sign the lease.) And I'm lazy. When people say "oh, I would love to not work", 95% of them are kidding themselves. I'm in the 5%. I can easily fill a day with laundry and reading and thinking, and feel fulfilled (if more than a little guilty). I'm never going to be totally ready to do this thing. (Which means, if Amy's right, that if I do it, I'll be great. I would rather like that.)

When I was little, every one's mum had a book called Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. Being the '80s, it was probably a diet book. But the title totally applies here. I feel the fear; no doubt about that. 

So let's see about doing it anyway.

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