Trying New Things & Chicken Wings

I just made chicken wings for the first time ever. I made the sauce from scratch and I even CUT APART THE WINGS. Seriously. I know you’re impressed.Jokes aside, I’m pretty proud of myself.  You’ll might think I’m crazy, but this sort of thing was entirely out of the question about a year ago.  Making a dish like wings would have been unfamiliar and potentially disaster-ridden, so I would have avoided it.  The work ahead of me – purchasing the supplies, cutting the wings, baking them appropriately – would have been too daunting to undertake.

That’s because I was depressed, self-loathing, and full of anxiety over the simplest of tasks.  Anything outside my comfort zone was really difficult to handle.  That is, until I realized I was unhappy.  Earlier this year, I recognized my complete inability to cope with the smallest of challenges and sought help.  For the last few months I’ve been taking Paxil and enjoying the lack of tensions and anxiety it provides me.  To be sure, it’s no miracle drug.  All it’s done for me is to take the edge off – to provide clarity without the cloud of anxiety.  But beyond that, it was up to me to fix myself.

I’ve been studying myself for these months, trying to determine how I reacted to various situations.  Trying new things always scared me, but I never dug around to figure out why.  What I discovered was a fear of failure.  In the case of chicken wings, I would’ve been overwhelmed at the opportunities for failure.  What if I couldn’t find an ingredient that the recipe calls for?  What if I couldn’t find the right kind of chicken?  Will it be a lot of work to cut all the chicken?  What if I get raw chicken grease all over my kitchen and contaminate everything?  And so on.  Before long, I was convinced it just wasn’t worth the risks – the risks which I had blown out of proportion.

But recently, I’ve discovered that more often than not, I can recover from any failure.  Didn’t get the right kind of chicken?  Well, I’ll improvise.  Can’t find an ingredient?  Whatever, I can think of a substitute.  What it comes down to is trusting myself.  I’m capable of working through most anything I’m handed in life, as long as I am focused on the problem at hand.   How many times in the past have I failed to step up because I didn’t think I had the capability inside of me?

Seven Day Challenge

Well, it’s over a month later and I haven’t posted crap. So here begins the 7 day challenge! For the next seven days (starting tomorrow, Tuesday, the 30th of October, 2007), I will post to this blog once per day. I expect all seven entries to suck, but so what? It’s not like anybody’s reading this…yet.

This idea was inspired mostly by Jeff Atwood’s great post about achieving blog success. He says all he did to achieve high readership was to keep at it – keep jabbing, like a boxer. I’ve been a high-volume blog reader for a few years now, and I love the format – it’s informal and personal, and there’s no overarching narrative to adhere to (consciously, anyway – but I’m a firm believer that we all have our own narrative). Best of all, there’s no barrier to entry – I didn’t have to pay a dime to set this up. It just takes a smidgen of effort.

The hardest part will be figuring out what to write about. I’ve got lots of ideas, but they seem so across the map. I’m a musician, a software developer, a pacifist, a geek, a liberal, a lover, a philosopher, a humanist, an uncle, a homeowner… But how do these things intersect? Are there connections among these eclectic topics which fit a larger pattern? Or am I just a weirdo admiring his own bellybutton?