“Trying is often the most subtle form of avoiding.”
Read that again. Let it crawl around in your skull for a minute. Let it find all the soft, comfortable, and completely rotten places where you’ve been hiding your whole goddamn life.
“Trying.”
What a pathetic little word. It’s the last refuge of a coward. It’s the sound a man makes when he’s already given up but doesn’t have the balls to admit it, not even to himself. It’s the alibi you whisper to the bartender, to the woman in your bed, to the goddamn mirror in the morning.
“I’m trying to quit drinking,” the drunk says, as he orders another double. He’s not trying to quit. He’s avoiding the raw, ugly, and completely terrifying silence of a sober night with his own thoughts. The trying is the performance. The trying is the lie that lets him order the next drink.
“I’m trying to find a good man,” the woman says, after she’s sabotaged another perfectly good relationship because the poor bastard didn’t check every box on her impossible, imaginary list. She’s not trying to find a man. She’s avoiding the hard, lonely, and completely necessary work of fixing her own goddamn self. The trying is the excuse she uses to stay broken.
“I’m trying to write a novel,” the poet says, as he stares out the window, a bottle of cheap wine in his hand, a beautiful, tragic look on his face. He’s not trying to write. He’s avoiding the simple, brutal, and completely unglamorous act of putting one goddamn word after another, day after day, until the page is full. He’s in love with the idea of the struggle, not the struggle itself. The trying is the beautiful, romantic costume he wears to hide the fact that he has nothing to say.
This is the great modern sickness. We’ve become a nation of “triers.” We’re all standing at the starting line of the race, sweating and groaning, telling everyone who will listen about how hard we’re training, how much we want to win. But nobody’s running. We’re just jogging in place.
Because trying is safe. Trying is comfortable. Trying is a beautiful, respectable, and completely passionless draw. There’s no victory in trying, but there’s no defeat, either. It’s a quiet, gray, and completely soul-crushing purgatory. You get all the credit for the effort, and none of the risk of the final, ugly, beautiful judgment of the finish line.
So what’s the cure?
You stop fucking trying.
You just do.
You want to quit drinking? You put the goddamn bottle down, and you sit in a room with your own shaking hands and your own screaming demons, and you don’t pick it up again. Not today.
You want to find a real woman? You stop looking for a goddess, and you start looking for another beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up human being who is just as scared and just as lonely as you are. And when you find her, you don’t try to love her. You just do.
You want to write? You sit your ass in the chair, you face the blank page, and you bleed. You write the worst shit you’ve ever written. You write until your back aches and your eyes burn and you hate the sound of your own goddamn voice. You just do the work.
You do it badly. You do it wrong. You fail. You fail spectacularly. You get your teeth kicked in. You get your heart broken. You make a complete and utter fool of yourself.
But for Christ’s sake, stop trying and start doing.
The world doesn’t give a damn about your good intentions. It only respects the scars. It only respects the blood on the page.
Trying is a quiet, slow, and completely respectable suicide.
Doing, even if you fail, even if you end up in the gutter, even if the whole world looks at you and laughs… doing is the only goddamn way to know you were ever alive.
