you'll pay an emotional price for your inaction
Recently, I come home from work and dissolve into nothingness. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and I wait. I don't know what I'm waiting for - perhaps for the next 12 hours to pass so I can be useful again at my corporate job? Initially, I called my idleness "a much-needed rest;" however, now I'm suspecting it's something closer to a comfortable form of avoidance, anxiety disguised as stillness for all the thing I want but won't show up for.
Because I do want things. I want to be a respected artist, I want to have an exhibition, I want to write a book and run a newsletter and change someone's life- I am a person who embarrassingly wants, who wants to clasp these things by the throat. Yet, I lie motionless in bed, reciting these wants like a broken record, as if I can summon them fully formed into my palms. Wanting is not a plan, though. It's not even a start, a beginning towards your goals. Wanting, left to rot without action, curdles into something that poses as ambition but is really just dread, reminding you of the gap between who you claim to be and what you actually did today.
When I choose inaction, I am not merely failing to gain my wants. I'm willingly allowing a precious part of myself to erode until there's nothing left to it. Lately, I circle the same question: how badly do I actually want this? Do I get to keep saying I want, I want, I want, if my hands never move to prove it? Isn't a want that moves - even clumsily, even for twenty minutes, even just one paragraph of my novel typed out before I fall asleep - the only kind that isn't a form of self-punishment? Every night, I pretend I'm not paying the price of my own inaction.