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content/blog/2010-12-23-reverb10-day-24-everythings-ok.md

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+---
+title: "#reverb10, day 24: Everything's OK"
+date: '2010-12-23T23:33:02-05:00'
+permalink: /reverb10-day-24-everythings-ok/
+tags:
+    - '#reverb10'
+    - reflecting
+---
+
+Today’s prompt:
+
+> Everything’s OK. What was the best moment that could serve as proof that everything is going to be alright? And how will you incorporate that discovery into the year ahead?
+
+It’s almost as though someone’s been reading [my advice to my past self](/reverb10-day-21-future-self/). The fact is, though, that there wasn’t any one particular moment this year when I got the proof that everything was going to be okay — not unless you want to point to something as obvious as getting the call from my dean saying my promotion had gone through, which wasn’t really a moment indicating that everything *would be* alright but rather that it *was* alright, and in fact had more or less been alright for a while, if not exactly all along.
+
+Anyhow, that moment is too easy, too conclusive. Instead, I want to think about the myriad small moments in which I find ways to convince myself that it’s all going to be okay.
+
+The paradigmatic one of these came for me at some point late in college or early in grad school; I can’t remember which. In any case, I was staring down the end of a semester that was coming much too quickly, with a mountain of deadlines and term papers and exams and the like to get through, and looking at the list of what needed to be done, and the too-few hours left to me to get it done in, and a low-grade panic started to set in. It just wasn’t possible.
+
+But something in me stopped and said, look. You’ve had *lots* of semesters like this before. And you always think you can’t get it all done. And yet you always do.
+
+In fact, you have never *not* gotten it all done.
+
+*So draw a breath. You’re going to get it all done. It’s all going to be okay.*
+
+I go through this routine — making a list of what needs to be done; beginning to freak out about the list’s impossibility; convincing myself that it’s in fact perfectly possible — at least once a semester. And some of those semesters have been more difficult than others, but it’s all always turned out okay.
+
+I now find myself going through a variant of this routine whenever I start a new writing project. I face the blankness of the text document or the roughness of what I thought was an outline but that turns out to be a few half-baked bullet points, and think, I’ve got no idea how to write this, what ever made me think I could. And usually the first day of working on the essay or article or whatever is miserable.
+
+But the second day is almost always a little bit better. And at some point in the first week of writing, I turn a corner: some connection gets made, some point gets clarified, some small gesture appears that lets me know that even though there’s a lot yet to be done — some of which is just going to suck — in the end, it’s all going to be okay.
+
+Those are the moments that keep me moving forward, the moments I need to hold on to. Just like facing down a miserable end-of-semester to-do list, facing down an empty text document is perfectly do-able. I do it more or less every time. The trick is just drawing that breath and pressing forward.
+