The Paralysis of Wanting Too Much

Notes on the space between imagining a life and building one!

I am, most days, in love with the idea of living.

I want to make art. Write things that sound like they cost me something. Brew a cup of coffee so specific to how I think that someone could take a sip and know, without being told, that it was mine. I want to travel until unfamiliar streets start to feel like memory. I want to build a life I can turn around and actually look at one day, and be proud of what’s standing there. I want to open a café, host people with food I made and watch people eat like they mean it. I want to learn languages until I can think in them by accident, learn cultures until they stop being facts I know and start being things I understand. A life that collects experiences instead of achievements.

For brief stretches, I actually believe I’ll do all of it. Not in the abstract, aspirational way people say these things at dinner. I mean I can see it. The room. The people in it. The exact texture of the life. It has never felt impossible to me, which might be the most dangerous thing about it.

And then it’s time to begin, and something in me just — sits down.

Not the dreams leaving. The dreams stay, loud as ever, taking up all the space they always have. It’s the wanting that stops translating into anything. The current cuts right before it reaches my hands.

I used to think this made me lazy, and some part of me still reaches for that word because it’s simple and it lets me off easy. But lazy people don’t usually spend this much time being haunted by their own unstarted lives. Lazy people aren’t kept up by a version of themselves standing just out of reach, arms crossed, waiting.

It isn’t laziness. It’s something with worse manners than that — something that lets me feel productive while I do nothing at all.

Maybe it’s that wanting a hundred lives makes it hard to commit to one. Every first step toward any single thing feels like a small betrayal of everything else I also wanted. Or maybe — and this is the one I don’t say out loud very often — I’ve gotten quietly addicted to the unstarted version of things. As long as an idea only exists in my head, it gets to stay perfect. The poem is flawless before I’ve written a single line of it. The café is already full, already mine, already loved — long before I’ve done anything as unglamorous as actually finding a way to own it. The moment I start, the thing becomes real, and real things can fail, and be judged, and be mediocre, and be mine in a way that’s much harder to hide from.

Underneath the confidence — and I do carry a strange, almost embarrassing confidence about the life I’m going to live — there’s a quieter question I try not to look at directly: what if none of it happens. What if the poet, the traveler, the person who made something people remember, never makes it out of my head and into a room. What if I spend the whole thing knowing I was capable and never actually finding out.

That’s the fear. Not failure, exactly. I could live with failure — failure at least means I tried and the world pushed back. This is much smaller and way worse than that. It’s potential, going quiet. A life that could have been something, slowly becoming a list of things I once mentioned I was going to do.

I don’t think the fix is waiting for a morning where I wake up overflowing with motivation. I’ve waited for that morning before, and it never once showed up carrying anything I could actually use. I think the version of me I keep picturing isn’t waiting for inspiration at all. I think he’s waiting for me to put the picture down — just for a minute — and do something small enough, unremarkable enough, for him to finally have somewhere to stand. Not the version of my life that plays like a film. The ordinary one. The one made on random Tuesdays. Where no one’s watching, the idea has already stopped feeling exciting, and I do the next small thing anyway — quietly, without an audience, for no better reason than the fact that it’s next.

I don’t know yet which version of this story I end up being. The one who did the things he used to only describe. Or the one who described them very well, for a long time, to anyone who’d listen.

But I think I’m finally scared enough of the second one to start finding out.