IT

Working titles. Sitting at a partially-filled page that contains nothing but meager ideas, haphazardly tagging on a line to some barely formed idea you recently haphazardly wrote. Attention's pulled in 6 simultaneous directions – the Facebook direction, the snacking direction, the Spotify direction, the neon-blinking-sign-called-phone direction, the wardrobe direction, the last-minute drinks direction. Typing out a fresh title. Deleting, it wasn't all that fresh. A smart title. Deleting, never smart enough. A witty title. Deleting, trying to be too much like somebody else. Despair starts to creep up as you wonder with a blast of terrifying revelation if anything you write under an untitled piece is automatically doomed to be aimless and meandering. Screw it. Bar it is. Tomorrow will be a more inspiring writing time anyway, and a drink will offset the nerves.

That's the existential dilemma the writing life forces you to face and figure out -- that title issue, popping up again and again and again, over and over and over. That belief that's somehow inadvertently but entirely lodged itself into my brain and maybe every brain of every perfectionist – that the title must be IT before good writing can occur. The profile picture must be IT before true "likes" can begin. The internship must be IT before life can progress. The chord must be IT before the song can get written.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in the IT. I think Kerouac's Dean Moriarty nailed IT when he said that clarinetist had IT the way his breath created his notes filled with our emotion that filled space with the substance of our lives. But that IT and the perfectionist "it"

are different. Dean's IT is that inherent energy, craze, reckless attention and care that the eccentric has who no one really understands but who beats everybody to that immaterial success. Perfectionist "it" is a fear-mongering, Big-Brother-esque idealization that you have to choose every step perfectly in the path to what you want or you're wrecked. And it is this "it" that demeans consistent work, consistent trying, consistent hoping, consistent dreaming, consistent going for it against all odds. And it is this "it" that consistently threatens to defeat me. Every. Day.

Maybe this isn't a belief every perfectionist accepts. Maybe I'm just a defenseless, ready-to-hate-myself sucker because I hang in the middle constantly. I have to be alone so I can write, but I don't want to be alone because I don't want to be lonely and discover something I could write about. I have to be focused, driven, in order to get anywhere, but I also need to have grace on myself so it's ok to watch five episodes tonight. I'm elated by a favorite artist but I'll never be as good as them so start digging my boring, trench-like life of humdrumness now. I need to write or I'll die of dissatisfaction and tension, but the chords are always beyond my knowledge. So, I'll go to bed early because, hey, God gives to the beloved sleep.

Maybe other people get it. Maybe they're able to balance their life to know when to create and when to be with people. Or maybe those people actually push themselves way too hard and have no friends. Or maybe they're caught up in the same hope-despair-hope-despair oscillation that I am. I want to believe that I'm special, that I have something that will meet with success just because I have IT. I'll be like those YouTube overnight sensations, I'll get discovered by an agent in a bar somewhere, I'll get a record deal from the stranger I sit next to on the plane. Or maybe all those YouTube sensations weren't "overnight" sensations. Discovering might take a night, but honest creative expression takes a lifetime. I don't always know. In the end, all I want is to be able to extricate the faux "it" from my innards and stamp it into the mud. Then I want to find the Dean Moriarty IT and infuse it – with all its glorious self-belief, humility, desire, open-handedness, dissatisfaction, willingness to risk it all – into my bloodstream.