R.C. Nechamkin

Feb 15, 2023 by R.C. Nechamkin, in Blog Post

It gets easier. Everyday it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it everyday. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.” 

      Right now I’m rewatching BoJack Horseman, and my goodness, what a show. I’ve so heavily associated it with the darker and more depressing moments, I forgot how hilarious it is and how uplifting it can be at times. Like at the end of season two, when Bojack tries to run and hates it. He collapses and an elderly runner provides him with the advice above. 
    Ain’t that life, man. I’ve been in confrontation with my habits, good and bad, for a while now and it is endless and often discouraging. For starter’s I’m a perfectionist, so when I start at something and I’m not perfect at it, I can grow frustrated quickly if I'm not careful. Whether it's learning to draw, getting back into fiction writing, or even lifting weights of all things, if it's too difficult or I don’t achieve the arbitrary image of what I believe success looks like in these fields quickly, I can either drop the habit or not even properly get into the routine of it.
    A while ago I finally decided to put pen to paper and actually write, and I told myself to write 1000 words a day. (For perspective, this blog post is 462 words). I’d always heard about some of the greats writing a song a day or similar ideas. Ray Bradbury–author of Fahrenheit 451–mentioned this same practice in his essay, “Run Fast, Stand Still,” flexing that he’d written “at least a thousand words a day every day from the age of twelve on.”
And when I decided to follow his lead, I stopped writing a thousand words a day on the fourth day. I hated what I was writing. Each day I produced one nonsensical dumpster fire after another. After that, the drive to write again didn’t creep up until I felt inspired to create the Polsix System which ignited a fire in me strong enough to power through what not loving every word I wrote. I passionately wanted to create this universe, so I ignored my own subpar passages just to move forward.
    Only once I built the habit of writing a thousand crappy words a day did I realize what I was doing though. I was toughing it out, allowing myself to be bad at something for the sake of improving. After a while, I started to see days where I wrote 1000 words that I actually loved effortlessly. And now I write 2,500 words a day on average, still hoping to improve with each passage. To leave you with one last quote, as Jake the Dog from Adventure Time said, “Sucking at something is the first step at being good at something.”

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