05/15/2024: Until We Make It
Despite being sick, I’m feeling good today. I went out to get my coffee and I came back to hole up in my apartment and see what the day brings.
Last night Caleb and I couldn’t sleep. We usually have a nightly ritual of laying in bed and talking and laughing forever. But in light of a dear friend’s recent loss, we’ve been feeling the pressures of time and how little we have of it. This has turned into a lot of talks about our dreams and goals.
Caleb handed me some rough sketches of his dream home, and a list of potential ways to achieve that dream along with our individual dreams of doing art and writing full time. We’ve yet to get into the details, but we’ve been thinking about what our futures could look like lately, what we hope they’ll look like sooner than later.
Soon I’ll be putting my work into the world, and I have a couple prospects for bigger projects. Caleb has started going to his figure drawing class every week, and he’s still plugging away and practicing every day. I see the progress even if he doesn’t. It’s been nice watching him come into his own with what he enjoys the most.
Meanwhile I feel like I’m still growing as a writer. This has been the only thing I haven’t grown tired of since I started it, and I hope that the joy continues to remain. I just wrote a follow up story to one I wrote last year, and I wrote for a whole day last week and I enjoyed every second of it. I’m also working on edits for a big project I started last year, and now that I’ve started to gradually put it together into a rough book draft, I’m starting to see that hard work coming together.
In both our cases, I know we’re blind to the progress we’ve made in our respective creative fields because we’re looking too closely from our up-close perspective. But every time someone looks at his art or reads one of my stories, we see how far we’ve come, even if we don’t feel it ourselves. Imposter syndrome is part of the growing process, and we won’t know until we really start putting ourselves out there.
I hope to get to the point where we do these things without thinking, a place where we are confident and happy in what we do, together, chasing the dream we’ve been hoping for for so long. We’re past the point of asking others for useless advice that only suits their point of view. We’re done asking permission.
It’s just us, doing this thing called life in the best way we know how, for us. I have a feeling we’re on the brink of some sort of realization or breakthrough. Whether big or small, I guess we’ll see. But every day we’ll keep striving until we make it.