There's no point in my life that anyone was a worse critic of my writing than myself. Scattering my train of thought with negative self-thoughts because of an awkwardly worded passage on my first attempt at articulating an idea is one of my most self destructive behaviors. It works with such subtlety that I barely notice it happen and it never lingers long enough for me to really unpack why I do it. It gets to a point as I'm writing where I am discouraged from completing the piece I'm working. It ends up shoving the idea so far off the main-way that I get disconnected from it and move on before it had a chance to be good or bad. Afterwards I am left with regret about not having finished it. 

This is probably an overactive mutation of an evolutionary adaptation to deal with the overload of daily generated content being created to steal and hold my attention long enough to sell me some crap. These are ideas from people I don't know that don't need to find their way into my brain. This same instinct is self destructive to my creative guts when applied to my own idea creation. It is so ingrained into my mental hegemony at this point that I don't even know why it is being applied to my own creative endeavors. Self destruction through the lens of conserving energy for something better to come along. 

That internal criticism that keeps me from finishing, or going back to fix old work for that matter, feeds a Schrödinger's masterpiece approach to things I don't write or edit. If I never looked at them they could be whatever my addled brain remembered them being. It feels like a measure of control against the outer world's disinterest and dislike of my unwritten/unedited work. Hidden away from even myself to keep the idea as whatever my memory has decided that it was. 

The truth behind it all is as simple as a fear of writing a piece of shit. It is a conflict between my desire to create and my fear of creating something terrible. Dan Harmon explained that the way to overcome the “conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly” is to embrace the suck. "…we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck.” I don't think my fear is unique, but I also don't think that means I should live with it and all the self-deprecation that comes with it. The choice is clear though, either let myself be mentally beat down into a rut again, or confront the fear and resolve the fallout.

This means working hard to write something that sucks. A complete something that sucks can be fixed and made to suck less. I can tell when something is bad, over-actively so. I have to trust in my own good taste enough to make my ideas less bad. It is a low bar, but those are easy to trip over. Though in this case tripping over the bar into disaster is not even contrary to my purpose of trying. 

 I have never really liked thinking of New Year's resolutions. Some idea that I swear by and say This is gonna be what I get done this year. It felt too...naive to think that the year wasn't going to have a few curve balls headed at me I'd need to deal with along the way. There was too much internal mental pressure to make it something "worthy" of being my primary goal of the year.  Finding the Goldilocks zone sweet spot between scope and achievability and ultimately abandoning the idea due to whatever unexpected events occurred that year.

Towards the end of 2025, I was looking at the books I had read that year and how it fell short of my reading goal. Toward the end of the year I started to feel guilt about not achieving the goal I set out to achieve. I was pretty down on myself with a typical mental exercise of remembering the goal, seeing where I fell short, and assigning blame to all the things I could have been doing different. All the moments I did other things that I enjoyed my brain tells me in that instant were obstacles I let derail my noble goal of reading a bunch of books.

Realize struck me when I found a self-hosted media journal that covered not only books, but movies, music, tv shows, and anime if I wanted it. After fiddling around to get it set up on my mini server, it sorta made me remember that I had read a ton of comics, articles, and role playing game books that were certainly valid candidates for my "things" read list. 

On top of that, shows I wanted to watch/was watching that I felt were interesting and valid stories worth me experiencing. One of the primary reasons I was pushing myself to read more was to ingest more stories and ideas. I decided shouldn't ignore the things that I take in that aren't specifically books. If I was going to combat my brain's misplaced feeling of guilt for not completing an arbitrary task that I myself made up, I at least deserve a fighting chance and being realistic about what I'm actually doing with my time.

This may seem sort of superficial or trivial in the sense that it's just a reading list, and it is just a reading list, but that is all the more reason to use it as an opportunity to practice being more kind to myself. Admittedly being kind to myself is a life skill I should have learned young and I am just now starting that 10,000 hour journey to become an expert in, but at this point it is too late to start earlier so there's no better time than now work on it.