I was not originally going to start the push-up challenge back up until about six months in, but I feel like I need to start it tomorrow. I feel like I was kind of foolish to stop working on it in November when my back started hurting, but it seemed unimportant, honestly.
It is most certainly not unimportant.
It is important because I need a win, y’all. I think that doing one hundre push-ups in a year is not a fait accompli. But, I really need at least one of these challenges to be an unqualified, unambiguous success. Something that I can just count. Count up to one hundred in one sitting, and I can mark it off the list.
It will still require a lot of hard work. It’s not like I can currently do forty push-ups, and I just need to level up once or twice. I can do one push-up—two if you put a gun that I saw you load up to my head. I need to do more than just level up. I need to have a massive increase in upper body strength in a short amount of time. The good news is that push-ups are really good for adding strength. I just have to, you know, do them.
My back is pretty whack right now. Unfortunately, that means that I’m going to be stuck on wall-push ups for a while. Which feel, frankly, silly. Sillier than knee push-ups. Which feel about as silly as a clown car full of silly beans.
Careful: these beans are silly.
My immediate goal is to do one hundred wall push-ups, twenty knee push-ups, and five proper push-ups by Valentine’s day.
I start tomorrow.
Let’s talk, y’all.
I feel like I’ve been unintentionally downbeat in my past few posts.
Sorry for that.
I know that I can be a bit much sometimes. Let me state that I do not believe that a psychiatric diagnosis is a personality. Also, I think that star signs are bit of fun, and do not take astrology seriously. But I am one-hundred percent a bipolar Cancer. Mercurial and melancholic in roughly even proportions. I would not say that I am ruled by my moods, but I am heavily influenced by them. And lately my moods have been a bit morose. And I have let my readers know about how bummed out I feel about some of the challenges.
And believe me, readers have voted with their feet. My mailing list is bleeding off subscribers at an alarming rate.
Not the actual chart, but you get the idea, right?
What can I do about it? Just keep striving to write to the best of my abilities. Keep pushing away at my goals. Goals like doing one hundred push-ups.
I have nothing to offer you guys except myself, ultimately. I want this newsletter to be unflinchingly honest. I am a fan of the kind of blogs where people take on challenges myself, and one thing they all have in common is unrelenting upbeat cheeriness. I find it really off-putting. And frankly, phony. I say this as a fan. Their panglossian personae always made me feel that my grumpy self should not even bother trying to take on some trials and challenges.
That unflappability is probably why lifehacker-type guys are so successful in things like skills acquisition. They are resilient. They don’t give up. They are able to re-focus on their goal after a setback. They have good distress tolerance.
They also ain’t me.
Guys like that are Tigger to my Eeyore. I do this challenge to spite them. To give double middles to the whole self-help/positive thinking industrial complex. To do as many things as I can without spending any more money than I absolutely have to. To make myself succeed at difficult things without getting rid of my jaundiced view of life. A bit of radical self-acceptance. I don’t need to be Lizzo, but for once in my life I need to accept that right now, in this moment, I am good. Good as I already am, and that I have permission to stop trying to warp myself into what I think I should be.
Obviously, I did not start this newsletter to show the world how hot shit I think I am by completing a bunch of challenges. What I am trying to show myself, and you all by extension, is that in spite of my rather gloomy and pessimistic personality, I can still be successful in trying to learn or do something challenging. This quest is not a referendum on how much I suck, how I have to change the fundamental nature of who I am in order to learn how to play Whole Lotta Love or write a screenplay or three.
Do you have any idea how many successful guitarists and screenwriters are utter fuck-ups? It’s about taking the imperfect, lovable fuck-up that I am and throwing him at the problem until it surrenders, or I break.
And I will break.
And I’ll put myself right again.
I just cannot quit. That’s the key, I think. The central thesis of this project is that I will learn and achieve things by putting in the work alone. Just doing what I can to move the needle a little bit every day. That it’s not about self-improvement or mastery, so much as trusting in a process. That and not giving up.
Spite, dogged perseverance, and my reflexively bleak gallows humor is how I’m going to succeed. Or fail. Or both.
Thank you, as always, for reading,
Drop me a line: jeremydnichols@gmail.com
Follow me on Twitter: @jeremydnichols
Follow me on Instagram: @germynickels
My PayPal: paypal for Jeremy Nichols