Feeding the Future

I have a dark creature on my back.

Something old and cloying has wrapped itself around my neck and learned the shape of my thoughts. It hangs there with its mouth near my ear, whispering in a voice that sounds too much like my own. It tells me what is wrong. It tells me what is unfair. It tells me what has not worked, what has not arrived, and what has not been given. For a long time, I mistook that voice for honesty, and through me, it became complaint. I thought this was release—a venting of pressure, a way of naming what was wrong so I could endure it. Lately, I have begun to wonder if complaint is not release at all, but a form of feeding.

And what I feed with attention grows.

That thought has been haunting me, because I can see how much time I have spent feeding disappointment. Frustration. Resentment. The sense that life is a locked room and every door opens only into another problem. I have spoken too often in the language of what is not working, what is unfair, what has failed to arrive, what remains beyond my reach. The more I spoke that language, the more fluent I became in it.

Hardship is real. There are actual disappointments, actual failures, actual systems that drain the spirit, and actual rooms full of people who have made complaint into a kind of weather. Stand in that weather long enough, and it gets into your clothes. It gets into your skin. It gets into your mouth. I have felt that happen. I have watched complaint infect my life, and I am tired of it—not in the theatrical way that wants sympathy, but in the cleaner, harder way that means I am ready to stop feeding the thing that has been feeding on me.

In this current world, with all its chaos, anger, and hardship, we are surrounded by complaint. I’ve especially seen this at work, and I’m not saying that to blame anyone. Believe me, I understand. But it is easy to become what surrounds us if we are not careful. It is easy to mistake shared frustration for camaraderie, cynicism for intelligence, bitterness for clarity. A room full of people naming everything wrong can feel honest, even righteous, because there is usually truth in the complaint. That is what makes it dangerous. Complaint rarely begins as a lie. It begins with an actual wound, an actual pressure, an actual disappointment. Stay there too long, though, and it changes form. It stops being truth-telling and becomes a ritualistic slog in the mud.

I have participated in that ritual more than I want to admit. I have complained because I was tired. I have complained because I wanted to be understood. I have complained because sympathy feels, for a moment, like justice. There is comfort in having someone agree that things are hard, that the road has been unfair, that the work has not been rewarded as it should have been. But comfort does not solve the problem. Sometimes sympathy becomes another small meal for the creature around your neck. It soothes you just enough to keep you in the same posture.

I want a different posture. All that complaining doesn’t actually lead to anything. In a world of problems, we need solutions, not more discussion of the problem.

This has been on my mind because I have been thinking a lot about manifestation, attention, and the strange power of what we choose to observe. I have always been skeptical of language that sounds too easy or too polished, especially when it promises the universe will simply hand us what we want if we think the right thoughts. But I am no longer willing to dismiss the connection between attention and outcome. Whether the mechanism is spiritual, psychological, practical, or something stranger, the pattern is hard to ignore. Negativity breeds negativity, and possibility creates energy. The way I attend to my life changes how I move through it. The way I speak about my life changes what I notice. What I notice changes what I choose. What I choose changes what I become.

Language is not nothing, for sound is not nothing. A word is a vibration sent into the world and back into the self. We speak, and then we hear ourselves speaking. We describe the world, and then we begin living inside the world we have described. If I keep saying that nothing works, that no one cares, that every effort is wasted, I should not be surprised when my body begins to believe it and the world molds into that image. Then, I should not be surprised when my energy collapses before the work even begins.

This matters to me as a writer, though I think it applies to my whole life. I want success. I might as well be honest about that. I want my stories read. I want readers to feel awe. I want people to respect me as a storyteller and as a creative mind. I want the financial independence that could come from a successful writing career. I want to finish the series I started and see the world I have built take root in the minds of others. There is vanity in that, yes, but there is also hunger, and hunger is not evil unless it begins to eat the work it was meant to serve.

That is where I have felt the danger. I have spent so much energy searching for success that I sometimes have little energy left to produce the work that could bring it. I have circled the same questions until they became a kind of maze. How do I reach readers? Why is this not working? What am I doing wrong? Why does success seem to come so easily to others? Why does every effort feel like pushing against stone? These questions may have their place, but they can trick the mind into believing it is working because it is worrying.

Worrying about the work is not the same as doing the work. Complaining about the lack of progress is not progress. Searching endlessly for the right angle, the right framing, the right doorway, the right spell—none of that replaces the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the finished book. I need energy, focus, and drive. I need to produce. The stories will not finish themselves out of sympathy for my frustration.

So I am trying to make a correction. Not a dramatic declaration that I will never complain again. I am human. I will have bad days. I will feel disappointment again. I will still want recognition. I will still look at the lives of others and wonder why the road opened for them and not yet for me. But I can become more careful about what I feed. I can notice when a complaint has stopped being informative and has become an appetite. I can ask whether the words leaving my mouth are making me stronger or weaker. I can choose not to build a home inside the problem.

I do not want to see the world as a series of problems arranged against me. I want to see it as a series of problems in want of solutions, and I want to become the kind of person who can provide them. A problem is not just a sentence. It is a shape asking to be met by intelligence, patience, discipline, imagination, and action. If I can bring those things to fiction, surely I can bring them to my own life.

There is humility in admitting this. I used to pride myself on having a good bead on things. I liked believing I could see clearly, that I understood people, systems, patterns, the hidden machinery of cause and consequence. The older I get, the more I realize how much I do not have figured out. At first, that realization feels embarrassing. If I were so smart, why am I only now learning some of the basic rules of the game? Why am I only now seeing how attention shapes energy, how language shapes perception, how complaint can masquerade as insight while quietly draining the will?

Maybe this is what growth feels like when pride loosens its grip. Not grand enlightenment, not a sudden blaze of certainty, but the quieter and more unsettling recognition that I have been wrong in ways I did not know how to see. There is pain in that, but there is also freedom. If I do not have everything figured out, then I am not bound to keep living by conclusions that have not served me. I can learn late. I can correct the course late. I can become wiser without pretending I was wise all along.

That may be one of the most hopeful thoughts I have had in a while. I can still change the way I attend to the world. I can still change the language I use. I can still change what I feed. I can become less available to complaint, less addicted to disappointment, and less willing to trade my creative energy for the temporary comfort of being agreed with in my frustration.

The future I want is not made of complaint. It is made of pages. It is made of discipline, health, attention, gratitude, production, courage, and the willingness to keep returning to the work before the world applauds it. It is made of mornings when I sit down and write instead of checking for evidence that I matter. It is made of evenings when I record what I completed rather than what has not yet arrived. It is made of conversations where I speak toward solutions instead of rehearsing defeat. It is made of the small, repeated act of giving my best energy to the life I claim to desire.

This all being said, I do not want to become a person who denies darkness. I write dark stories. I know there is truth in the grave, the wound, the haunted place, the long night of the soul. But even in my fiction, darkness is never interesting merely because it is dark. It is interesting because of what people do inside it. The question is whether I let darkness rule, or do I push it down into the basement where it belongs, where it becomes the foundation that supports what I build in the light.

So, I am trying to cast off the creature. It will take time, attention, and constant refocus. I have already reread this post a half-dozen times as a kind of mantra. I do not think our worst habits die like monsters in stories. They loosen slowly. They weaken when unfed. They become less powerful each time we refuse to mistake their voice for our own. Complaint has had its mouth near my ear for too long, and I have listened too often. Now, I want to listen for something else: the next sentence, the next solution, the next act of courage, the next sign that the life I want is being built by the attention I give it today.

What I feed with attention grows.

I want to feed the work. I want to feed gratitude. I want to feed discipline. I want to feed possibility. I want to feed the version of myself who finishes what he begins, who speaks with more care, who does not confuse frustration with depth, who does not make a shrine of every disappointment. I want to feed the storyteller, the husband, the worker, the creator, the man still becoming.

Maybe greatness begins there. Not in applause, not in validation, not in the sudden arrival of everything desired, but in the private correction of attention. In the refusal to keep feeding the wrong future. In the decision to stop giving the best of myself to what drains me and start giving it to what might yet be made.

I do not have everything figured out. That is becoming more obvious with age, not less. But I know what has been feeding on me. I know what I have been feeding in return. And I know what I am finally ready to starve.

I am tired of complaint.

I am ready to produce.

I am ready to place my attention where I want my life to grow.

Cheers!