These sound like judgments, of course, but through a compassionate lens, they’re just benign observations.
This is the beauty and the horror of being a writer — or trying to be anything, really: You can feel important or unimportant. No one cares. No one is watching. You can have fun or you can suffer. No one is grading you. No one is invested. You can proclaim yourself ahead of schedule, or you can spend your whole life telling yourself that you’re running behind. No one is there to measure. You can suspect that you’re insecure and outdated, long-winded and short-sighted, high-strung and lowbrow. Or you can conclude that you’re charismatic, a teensy bit talented, never boring, and reasonably worthy. You have choices. You are the decider. Because the truth is, no one else gives a flying fuck. What are you doing right now? Are you really running late? Or are you doing it your way — your unique, slow, strange, panicked, bewildered, besieged, bewitching way? How do you stop comparing yourself to others? You do it the same way you stop smoking: You just quit. You resolve to remove your insecure judgments from every equation. Instead, you observe from a distance. You reach for your compassion. And when you observe through the lens of compassion, you notice that the people with the nice apartments secretly hate their jobs, and the fast-zombies with graduate degrees secretly hate themselves, and the hip-to-the-scene writers secretly hate each other. – ask polly op 12 december 2018
[angstaanjagende vrijheid, begeerlijke eenzaamheid, of being a writer, or trying to be anything, really, no one cares, no one is watching… er is praxis]