I am locked in a fight with Resistance. She’s been kicking my ass for a while. Resistance lobs grenades at me, mortar shells, spit balls, and mean names. She shows up at my door every evening with a bottle of cheap wine and a stink bomb, hidden in bunch of fake roses. Every day she says: not here. Not now. Not you.

Resistance tells me to relax. Watch a movie. Smoke some weed. Take a day off, take a load off, take a vacation. Take a life off. Resistance whispers in my ear that I am not quite ready to do my life’s Work. Who are you, she says sarcastically, to do this? When I get riled she says hey, hey, don’t take it so personal. You can start your life’s work…tomorrow. Or the next day—I hear the weather’s supposed to be good on Thursday. Or maybe, the day after that.

There is nothing in the world I want more than to do this Work. I am scared shitless because it seems so big and I want it so bad. Every day I don’t do it is a day consumed by frantic distraction. I don’t want to remember that it is still there, just patiently waiting for me to do.

Resistance is wrecking my sleep by keeping me from doing what I want, what I need, to do. To rise to my calling. To realize my life. The pressure has been mounting and every day I feel a little more anxious, a bit of a fraud. And now here I am, with exactly the perfect place, enough time, and all the support that I need—to begin what will surely be a long and difficult and confounding and transformative task. If and when this Work is ever ‘done,’ I surely won’t be the me I am now.

I am as ready as I’ll ever be. I’ve had it up to here with being bullied by fear.

To Resistance I have only this to say: Fuck off. I have Work to do.

************

<<With a deep bow to Stephen Pressfield and The War of Art>>