The point is to sit down to write. You can think of something you want to write about—something grand, something that speaks some truth to life (which is full of lies, but mostly full of truths you withhold from yourself, or ones you’re two scared to feel)–and then you don’t do it. You tell yourself you will. But by the point you sit down to do it, you’ve lost the feeling—that thing behind it that was the truth, the realness. And then in seeking perfection, or being scared to write because you feared that it wouldn’t be right or perfect, you lose sight, you let go, of the thing that was there spurring you to do it. 

And perfection doesn’t exist. Not in an existence when time is constantly rushing in. Any second you wait before nailing down whatever was pushing you to write, to make art, is a second closer to losing that thing. It’s like when you need to shit and you wait too long and then all of a sudden you’re constipated. Or you’re hungry but you wait a couple of hours and then that feeling is gone, too. Nothing lasts. Not a single feeling. So if you want to preserve the honest truth of some feelling, you have to get it out. Not as soon as possible. Immediately. And that’s as close to perfection as you can get. Wait too long, and everything you write about that feeling will seem fake and fabricated. Like a bad song. 

That said, today I wrote in my Notes app (let’s go girls) is: “regret is such a big, fat human emotion that we think we could do better without. After all, time is the only thing we have that’s limited—so why make room for regret? But regret is human. And I might hate it, but it is.” Is that profound? No, not really. It’s not anything any of us didn’t already know. But it’s a thought I had, reflecting in that moment on my life. And so it stays.

That, and all the thoughts I was having about pain after reading Marina Abramovic’s memoir, Walk Through Walls. About how it’s necessary. And actually kind of important and pleasurable in its own way, not even strictly in a masochistic sense. If you think about it, when pain comes first, pleasure follows. If the pleasure comes first, you can anticipate pain after (e.g., a hangover, giving birth, STDs). But Dalia, you say. In the grand scheme of life, isn’t all pain followed by pleasure, at some point? And all pain followed by pleasure? Yeah, sure. But there’s sometimes pleasure directly hidden in pain (the discomfort of meditation or a workout), like one of those little trinkets in a box of red dye 40 cereal. Do they still put the little prizes in cereal?

And another statistic I discovered, I forget where: most people who become leaders are not smart. They just talk the most. If you want a position of power: don’t be smart, be loud. It’s dumb, but it’s true. But no one should want to be loud, so just forget the power altogether.