Little Wins Mean Everything

stop what you're doing right now and do the thing you've been putting off (then read this)

I have been living life on the back foot for months. It’s like wakeboarding. I’m behind the boat, I’m holding the rope. I stand up. But instead of oscillating from side to side, searching for that sweet, sweet glass outside the wake, I’m 30 feet behind the boat, bent at the waist, trying to navigate the chop being churned out by the prop. I’m holding the rope, so theoretically, I have the chance to be in control, but instead, I’m just hanging on for dear life. The boat is just yanking me along and I can’t let go. I don’t want to fall and get left behind, because that will hurt in more ways than one, but I’m not really wakeboarding, either. I’m just holding on, wishing that stupid boat would slow down.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been white knuckling each day, begging myself to actually get started on that story, send that email, reply to that friend. Nothing is scarier than a blank Google doc. It just feels like a mountain I cannot climb. I can’t even call it Sisyphean, because as far as I know that guy actually started up the hill.

I know I can write a story in a few hours, send an email in a few minutes, and send a text in a few seconds, but for some reason, I don’t do it (ADHD, I suspect, but that doesn’t tell the whole story). There’s probably some fear in there, some anxiety, some dam I built that was supposed to yield energy and protection but ended up just killing the beautiful ecosystem downstream.

Trying to break that pattern has been the battle of my life lately. I pick up my phone, I scroll TikTok, I look at Instagram, and most of the stuff I see, I don’t even like. But oh damn that dopamine! ya know what I’m saying?

To stymie that impulse, I’ll periodically delete social media, pick out a book (hard copy, of course), and tell myself I’ll have a productive evening with no scrolling and I’ll feel better in the morning. That works for a night, or at least until I find myself on the toilet for an extended period of time. Do I download TikTok because it’s a long trip to the toilet or is it a long trip to the toilet because I downloaded TikTok? A real chicken or the egg situation. Anyway, I spend way too much time idling. And the thing about idling is, you’re not turned off and you’re not getting rest. The RPMs are still going, the engine revving ever so slightly, just enough to stay on edge. Did I send that email? Did that story turn out ok? I never even checked to see if it was published. Did they like it? Did people read it? Do people think I’m stupid? This is the long black train of thought that runs through my head most hours of most days, like the circular Christmas train track from hell. I’m the tree in the middle, unaware that I’m about to spontaneously combust.

A to-do list helps, but as someone who is unrelentingly scatterbrained, the to-do list is never complete. Or, at least, it feels like it’s never complete. I never feel like I’m doing the right thing at the right moment, because no single task has its moment, it’s just a bunch of moments and a bunch of tasks. Even a meticulously crafted Asana board can’t make sense of it (I’m disgusted with myself for making that reference, but the thing is, you’ll all get it). Another way to put it: if the first plane of the day is late, every plane that day is late — and some planes never even get to leave the airport. Then allllllllll of those flights get moved to tomorrow, and, well, you get the picture.

So now we arrive at little victories. When everything is difficult and my shoes can’t hold any more little fucking pebbles, I pick one little pebble and take it out. And, sometimes, that little pebble was actually a bowling ball and the relief is immense. If you’re a staller, a procrastinator, an ADHD’er, you know the feeling of checking off a task — especially if it took you forever to get to it. In some ways, to me, every task I check off is just what I was supposed to do — I’m just too stupid or lazy to have done it when I was supposed to. But that’s a foolish way to think. Jettisoning that pebble, doing that task, is a win. Each task is a victory and I am allowed to see it that way. I SHOULD see it that way. I’m not saying that every time I send an email I throw a victory parade, but I can tell myself, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad, you did it, you can do it again tomorrow.” And tomorrow, I think about how I did the thing yesterday, so I can surely do it again, and so on. Next thing I know, I’ve taken my creatine every day for a month and I’m yoked! Jk, I’m just carrying a bit more water, but my friends say the change will come. Right? RIGHT?

Anyway, here’s the deal: a little win, which can seem wholly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, can be the catalyst for a bunch of small wins. And a bunch of small wins is how you win the actual war. It’s like running a marathon. You run one 5k, then you run the next, then the next, and before you know it…you still have an entire half marathon to go…BUT, you have already completed one half marathon, and that’s pretty cool. (Don’t check my math on that.) Doing the thing that is excruciatingly horrible in the moment, which is probably something much easier than it became in my head, is the only way to push forward and check the next thing off the list. Pretty soon, I’ve banked a lot of wins, a lot of confidence, and I think eventually that means moving out of the bottomless pit of despair and into a world full of possibilities. I think I’m still in the pit, but for the first time in a while, I don’t feel like I’ll be there forever.

Tonight, I felt the urge to write something, I had 15 minutes to do it (45 now that I’ve gone back and edited it), so I sat down and fuckin’ did it. Me taking the opportunity to sit down and write this is a little win. And maybe reading this was a little win for you, too.

See you soon.