Do the Thing, Katherine

Today, I needed a pep talk.

To be fair, I was already having a day.

The reality that all three of my kids are now officially out of the house had finally hit me.

Not intellectually. I already knew that.

It hit me in my body.

I was on my way home after getting two of the three settled into college, and somewhere along the way the reality of what I was returning to landed.

An empty house.

For the first time in more than two decades, none of my children live with me.

There is excitement in that. Pride. Possibility.

And apparently, also grief.

Lots of fucking feelings.

So my emotional bandwidth was perhaps not operating at maximum capacity when I remembered there was something else I needed to do.

And apparently I needed a pep talk.

Not for anything objectively terrifying.

I wasn’t preparing to give a speech in front of thousands of people.

I wasn’t about to have a difficult confrontation.

I wasn’t jumping out of an airplane.

I needed to do something extraordinarily simple.

A thing I have done approximately ten billion times in my life.

A thing requiring almost no physical effort and very little time.

And I absolutely did not want to do it.

So I didn’t.

For hours.

I knew I needed to do it.

Didn’t do it.

Thought about doing it.

Still didn’t do it.

Did several other things while being completely aware that I was not doing The Thing.

Eventually, The Thing stopped being a normal, boring task and became an ominous portal through which all possible forms of terrible might enter my life.

This is one of the more fascinating things the human brain does.

Leave something alone long enough and suddenly it develops mythology.

The Thing itself hadn’t changed.

My relationship with The Thing had changed.

Because I wasn’t actually afraid of doing it.

I was afraid of what doing it might require of me afterward.

There might be nothing.

There might be something mildly annoying.

There might be something complicated.

There might be something that required thought, decisions, conversations, work, or emotional energy I did not particularly feel like giving anyone.

The possibilities were endless.

Which meant my brain could populate the unknown with absolutely anything it wanted.

Very helpful.

Thank you, brain.

Eventually I realized I needed to stop trying to reason with myself and try a different approach.

I needed a hype person.

Unfortunately, I was the person available.

So I gave myself a pep talk.

Not a gentle one.

More of a locker-room speech for a woman facing an opponent whose primary weapon was apparently mild inconvenience.

It went something like this:

Katherine.

You have done hard things.

You have navigated actual crises.

You have made consequential decisions.

You have walked into rooms knowing people were unhappy with you and walked out just fine.

You have survived heartbreak.

You have survived loss.

You have survived enormous upheaval.

You survived a fucking landslide.

An actual landslide.

The side of a mountain came down.

You dealt with that.

And today you are being held hostage by something that is objectively not difficult?

Katherine!

Absolutely not.

We are not doing this.

Then I reminded myself of something that should probably be printed on a small card and distributed to adults everywhere:

Doing The Thing does not create whatever might be waiting on the other side of The Thing.

If there is a problem, it already exists.

If there isn’t a problem, I am currently carrying anxiety about an imaginary one.

Either way, information improves my position.

That sounded very mature and rational.

So naturally I followed it with:

DO THE THING, KATHERINE.

And you know what?

Sometimes this is what courage looks like.

Not charging into battle.

Not surviving catastrophe.

Not standing strong while your entire life changes around you.

Sometimes the woman who survived a fucking landslide needs several hours, an existential crisis, a motivational speech, and some aggressive self-talk to accomplish a task that is objectively very fucking easy.

Human beings are ridiculous.

I am a human being.

Apparently, this is how we’re doing things today.

Just fucking do it.