This isn't what I wanted to write
even this subtitle is completely wrong
It was different in my mind. This intro was stronger, packed more of a punch, landed the plane. The title was great too, not the best but good - it worked, and now this? I shoulda done it differently, and I could have, so why didn’t I? That’s the real thing to figure out. What happened?
By now in the essay, I'd have made a seamless transition into personal anecdote. I'd be telling you about how this thought came to me while meditating this morning, though I'm not sure you can really call it meditating when all you do is think about dumb shit. Or is that the whole point of meditating? I need to have a strong stance before I write this. A point of view, not this wishy washy woozy bullshit.
When doubt abounds, everything is wrong. It used to paralyze me from writing a single word. Surely there was a better way, a more right way, to string the words together, when communicating this very point? But I couldn’t figure it out which meant everything that followed would be busted too.
The sheer magnitude of potential and inevitable failure made me wanna hurl. But I was too chicken shit to even do that.
I couldn’t even hurl.
So I wrote nothing.
Inaction cannot be critiqued because it did not exist.
Except, of course, it did.
Newton’s fourth, imperfect law: inaction is itself action.
If true, then not writing is the worst move you can make. A breakthrough! By the logic of Newton himself, writing is better than not writing!
Close, it turns out, is true in horseshoes, hand grenades, AND personal writing.
I know this all, in my mind, but my fearheart forgets.
The perfectionist - Percy, he refuses to start, disgusted at the mere attempt to chance it, to write something that, according to the odds - the odds, charlie! - won't be right.
Take this sentence. That one that I just wrote. How do I know that was the right way to write it? The write way to right it? Think of the options, charlie:
Take, for example, this sentence.
And then there's this sentence.
This sentence, just as an example.
Wanna see an example of a sentence?
Hey dipshit you ever seen a sentence before?
Finding the right one assumes there is a right one, out there, somewhere, that must be found. This - yes baby this - is the whole point.
There isn't a right way to say anything. There is only what emerges. A feeling becomes words so it can again become a feeling. From me to you and back again.
All of this - the sentences and words and hell, even paragraphs, are lil vehicles that transport ideas and feelings and things we don't yet have words for (galoons, rushbas, pooms) from me to you and back to me again, like an echo echo echo.
The right way to write is the one that happened. It's very happening is what makes it right. Because it exists.
No, this isn't the piece I wanted to write. Not even close. It's so much better. It's the piece I wrote.
Now, that doesn’t mean I can’t look at my writing and improve it. That ending above, for example, is nice but a little too…The Moth NPR. So I’d probably end instead with this dumb selfaware aside followed by a random thought I had while editing:
FEARHEART (2025) - The spiritual successor to Braveheart.
Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM! No? You wouldn’t? I agree! Let’s all go home and rest this war stuff is spooky.
Support
Both Are True is a reader-supported newsletter, which means it - and I, Alex Dobrenko The Fearful - rely on your generous contributions etc. to keep it going.
So please, consider becoming a paying subscriber.
Also a lot of people have been asking if they can just make one-time payments instead of a subscription. Ok no they haven’t I just made that up but i’m sure some of you were thinking it! If you wanna do that, just respond to this and i’ll send you paypal instructions.
Comment
thoughts?
this feels like one of those lessons i learn again and again - what are some of those lessons for u?
i hope ur good today are you?
what else? got some imperfect shit to share? do it here i dont care I think it’d be great really.
things aren’t the way they used to be so they can become they way they are.
just made that up should we put it on an airbnb painting?
Whatever this was, I enjoyed it
I had to write new brand messaging for a client this week in their refreshed brand voice and this is exactly what was going through my head! Including Hey Dispshit! At one point I just had to stop. As the Moth says, Done is better than perfect.