You can't kill the hydra by taking its heads you have to pierce the heart. I can start anything. Finishing is the part you never get to see. Because everything alive in me lives at the beginning. The first idea. The first conversation with someone I haven't let down yet. And then the thing turns from making it to keeping it going, from starting to actually finishing, to the moment someone might look and judge it and I'm gone. Not lazy. Not tired. Just gone. I've left the room before the part that counts. You can't kill the hydra by taking its heads you have to pierce the heart. But if you never finish, you never fail. So when it gets hard, just take a head and go find something new to start. I am very careful about how I'm seen. I won't release the work. I won't share the thing I made, won't send the message, won't put it in front of anyone who could weigh it. I call high standards It was fear clothed false finery. In the dark, the work stays full of promise. In the light, it becomes a verdict and I would rather be full of promise forever than be measured once. And I've built a version of myself for you to admire. The one who has it together. The one who walks in like he's already won. hiding the work so you can't judge it. performing so the judging's already done before you open your mouth. I arranged my whole life so I'd never actually be tested only assumed to be good. I don't push when pushing is still easy. I let the boring things slide until they pile into something big enough to be ashamed of and then the shame becomes the reason not to see them. And maybe you know this feeling. You count up all the things you started and you mistake the motion for a life. But it's a field of half-dug foundations, you keep walking past them, calling the walking progress. You can't kill the hydra by taking its heads you have to pierce the heart. But if you never finish, you never fail. So when it gets hard, just take a head and go find something new to start. And here's the one I most want to skip. My word doesn't hold me. Not to you. Not to myself. I promise and the promise lasts about as long as the excitement, and when the excitement fades the promise quietly disappears, and I tell myself nobody noticed. People notice. The ones who were counting on me noticed. And I didn't let them down with some dramatic betrayal. I did it with a thousand small failures to do the thing I said I'd do. One at a time. Until the trust was gone. Now here's where I stop letting myself off the hook. This the reflecting, the analyzing, the careful honest account is itself the hiding. I'll write a thousand words about my problem before I'll make one uncomfortable phone call. The thinking feels like the work. It costs the same energy, so when I'm done I'm tired, like I did it when all I did was describe it, beautifully. perfectly. impotently. I keep drawing the map. I keep admiring the map. I've never walked the ground. underneath all of this is someone who thinks worse of himself than he might be. I half-believe the light will expose a fraud, of course I'll stay in the dark. But I won't end this in despair, because honestly, despair would let me off the hook too. You can't kill the hydra by taking its heads you have to pierce the heart. But if you never finish, you never fail. So when it gets hard, just take a head and go find something new to start. You can't kill the hydra by taking its heads you have to pierce the heart. But if you never finish, you never fail. So I will stab. I will stab at the heart of the beast and see what I’ve wrought. I will stab at my own fear, stab at my misgivings, stab at my insecurities. I will annihilate my safe haven, drop my armor, and step into the fray. Violence of action is now more metaphorical than literal for me, but it remains the mechanism I require to break the bonds with which I’ve so bound myself. And the only proof that counts is that I'm not keeping this to myself anymore. I'm saying it out loud. Where you can see me. And now it's a little harder to go back to hiding. Aim for the heart. Aim for the heart.