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I'm no stranger to disatisfaction, I don't any person has been for their entire life. Despite how easy it is to preach about being content, I find that it's a harder journey than it looks. There have been cycles where I go through life with nothing to worry about, and others where everything feels like it's sinking faster than I can handle. I'm aware that change and innovation is bred from discontent, but it doesn't make the uncomfortable any less painful to sit through. These days it's been harder and harder to feel satisfied with my work, and I wonder if it really is worth sitting here trying to attain a goal of being happy with anything I've done in my sites.

I'll be honest and say that the specific thing that has been a pain in the ass to handle has been Velvet's Smoking Lounge. How can you depict a part of yourself that is bombastic and ambitious in a way that is achievable? How can you really show others unique about that part if you don't even fully know how to express it? I have tried different techniques and applied what I learned, only to scrap everything I did because I couldn't make the thing I wanted to work. Despite everything I've worked for, my tastes and inspiration didn't match my skills. It's a hard pill to swallow, one that made me question if it was really worth the effort I put into an idea that I had to scrap again and again.

It's really frustrating having the best idea in your head not translate into real life. Ideas are easy, you can daydream about how great your creation may be without any effort. But the thing is, you need to actually do something in order to make something come true. It's not enough you have good ideas, it's being able to turn them into a reality. It feels hollow just sharing ideas because you aren't sure if reality will match up to the expectations. I used to be one of those authors/creators that kept ideas to myself because I thought someone will steal my ideas, only to realize how bullshit that notion is. It was never mostly about the concept, it was about excecution. And I keep repeating this cycle of thinking about something without really thinking about the implications, if it is possible with the tools I've been given, if I can actually do the thing my head wants to put on paper. I desperately want to express myself in a way someone could understand and impressive, but that's not possible. Only 1 out of 100 ideas I'll ever have will become a reality and I'll just have to accept that.

I won't be candid in saying that having to start over, despite all the work and effort you put into something, feels terrible. If you poured money into it, it feels even worse seeing it all go down the drain. To me, time is money. Time is as much of a financial resource as cash, to have wasted at least a day of my life without nothing to show for it is enough to drive me to tears. To have an idea that you poured a lot of time into, only for it to not work feels awful. I feel even more obligated to finish the more time I waste on something I created because I don't know if I'll ever get that motivation again. I've been putting more pressure on myself to make that ideal site of my dreams, but it'll never happen. Not without having to sit through the grueling hours of experience and time. I have to face the reality that trying to compete with sites that had years under their belt, is an unattainable goal. I've been trying to speed up the process of learning when it doesn't work that way. Skill is not given, it's earned through hard work and dedicating your time into it.

In my quest to learn faster and to obtain the skills I need to express myself I want to, I've been way too comfortable in using shortcuts that only make things harder for me. I don't think about whether or not this thing I'm doing will actually work or help me in the future. Instead, I'm content in skipping the context of why a thing works the way it does, I skip the important instructions in the manual. I want something easy and simple to do the thing I want to happen, when in some cases, that's not how it works. I need to go through the painful process of failing again and again in order to learn something. I'm too afraid to fail. I mean who really, in the history of anything, wants to? But the reality is, that I need those failures in order to find out what works. For how many thousand successes one can have, there's a billion other more failures that get ignored. It's the price of admission if you want to take the risk of creating something. It's a painful truth that I have to accept if I want to ever get anywhere.