MOTIVATION CONSTIPATION

If there's one thing that's been fairly constant in my life, it's the lack of motivation. I'm almost certain I've written about this in the past, but I'm too lazy to search for and link said entries. But as I was saying...

I have dreams — I want to write short stories/novels. I want to design a board game or five. I want to do movie/gaming reviews. I want to podcast. I want to help people. I want to achieve financial stability by engaging in something that I love. I want to uncover the government's deepest, darkest secrets and expose them to the world!

I believe I have ambition (though I hesitate to say this, because I feel most would argue you can't be ambitious without motivation, but I'd disagree) — Many of my writing projects are linked together by a myriad of narratives, one series of which consisting of roughly nine books. Even the games I want to design have become linked in a common setting/world. I want to star in and direct a movie that I wrote the script to, based on a novel I wrote, featuring a song by a band that I'm the lead singer/songwriter of!

I dunno, some of that sounds ambitious to me. Maybe it all falls under the "Dream" category? Maybe I'm conflating it all.

Either way, the problem with it all generally rests on the shoulders of motivation. I mean, obviously some of those goals are lofty and unrealistic — who has found financial freedom through their passion, am I right? But many of them are fairly realistic, even if what eventually comes from them are subpar or don't meet my expectations (would anything I create or do ever live up to my expectations anyway? Spoiler Alert: Magic 8-Ball says "Not Likely").

The most I can muster are sporadic spurts of motivation. An idea comes to me, I get excited about it, and I go to town. Except on the way to town I see something shiny off in the distance — whether it be another idea or something completely random — so I get distracted, because who wouldn't want to know what the source of all the shine is? And on the way to the new destination, what do you know? Another shiny! Eventually I remember I was originally going to town for a specific reason, but now not only am I way off course mentally, it starts to creep into the crevices of my mind that my original idea wasn't worthwhile anyhow.

Those vapid thoughts sometimes fail at completely taking over, though, and instead of abandoning the idea indefinitely, I'm left in a constant tug-of-war between wanting to revisit it (because I really want to manifest it into reality) and attempting to bury it deep, down below (because obviously it's a complete waste of time). It remains there, near the surface, covered in loose dirt. Taunting me to take its mangled hand it's managed to unearth, despite how many ever times I've smacked it down with a shovel, yearning for me to just embrace it. To love it.

But instead it gets the shovel!

Basically, if I don't stick with something — no matter how important it is to me and/or how exited I am about it — that random, yet miraculous, spurt of motivation sputters out and it can sometimes take an act of God to recover it. And sometimes not even that works!

I feel like I went on a rambling session there and I'm not even fully sure I made my point (if I had one to begin with).

But regardless, motivation is a fickle bitch.

Fuck motivation.

Yeah, that was it, I think. Nailed it.