Oh my god, just do *something*
Wherein the author begs you (and himself) to, for the love of god, just start.
One expression that has always stuck with me is "Start as you mean to go on." I couldn't tell you where I picked it up, except that I heard it somewhere as a child and it's been in the background ever since. And for blindingly obvious reasons, it's probably caused me to never start something much more often than it's spurred me to fruitful and productive endeavors.
Take this page for instance. In April 2024 I (rather nervously) mentioned to my therapist that I had a lot of feelings about what my career was and how often I was asked for (and provided!) advice. In May 2024 I finally said out loud for the first time (again, to my very, very, very patient therapist) that I actually wanted to build something around that, to leave artifacts of my experience and maybe even a corpus of work. Throughout the summer I reached out to friends who have blogs and I even got connected to a Life Coach to ask them how they started on that path. I thought about online monikers and what my icons would look like. Should I do a YouTube channel and if I did what would that look like? Should I make reels on Instagram? Should I, someone a stone's throw from 40, even try TikTok? Would I be a blogger? Would I do it part-time? Would I try and build a career out of it or just create something on the side to have anything I was proud of doing?
And the summer rose and fell.
And the fall began its long-lingering descent into winter.
And December arose and we lumbered, half-dead, over the very edge of the work year, into the holidays and now, just a few scant hours away from 2025, I sit.
I could ask where the time has gone, but that's an easy question. I could ask why I didn't do something (or anything) with months of knowing a general direction, but that's also pretty easy. I could even ask why now, but the end of the year and wanting to say "I started this in 2024" can have a powerful push to put some kind of digital pen to electronic paper.
Ultimately, you can't start as you mean to go on. For me, that was an invitation to mentally ideate and cycle through ideas and sketch out what I'd say in the shower or when walking the dog all without the painful and hard and necessary work to actually do it. Or maybe I was actually starting as I meant to go on – I started not doing anything and I surely continued that through to the very end of the year. And at the end of it, I can't say I've been happy with that choice.
I'm not a sentimental type, particularly for the end of the year. The holidays are always hard on me (and always were, even from when I was a kid). My mom passed in early January almost twenty years ago. The weather has changed from cold and snow thirty-five years ago to doggedly sitting at 40 degrees with all the gray and rain associated with it in the 2020s. All of this contributes greatly to the general sense of, at best, listlessness that for me typifies mid-winter in the Midwest. And accordingly, I am not the type to make New Year's Resolutions; usually I find myself stuck between wanting literally no more of the year that has passed and unwilling to see any good in the year to come. And yet, here I am, saying I will finally do something now that a New Year is here.
But for the love of god Montresor!
Yes, for the love of god.
At least the villain Fortunato did something to leave a mark on the world, as heinous as entombing a man alive is. Rather than wait until you can start as you mean to go on, just start laying bricks now. Maybe your fortune will step out of the tomb halfway through and flee. Maybe you'll have to come up with a quick lie about the condition of your wine cellar to trap him just a little longer. Maybe you'll pivot into masonry and leave all your goals of murder and mayhem in the past. But you'll never end up somewhere if you don't start leaving, and you'll (I guess) never brick up your most-hated enemy in your walls if you don't start laying bricks. And I'm going to start because there's no other way to begin.