Good afternoon crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-eighty-five of Operation Achieve Anything. It’s time for another post, but this one won’t be as long-winded and ranty as the one from yesterday. Right now, I’m feeling extremely burnt out from trying to catch up on the work that I put off last weekend to spend some quality time with my dying dog before having to put her down on Monday. Adjusting to life without my pets, and major source of evidence that there is other life on this world while I live out my shut-in existence has also been pretty draining.

To add to the fun, other than the internet reaching out to share some support when I posted pictures of our fleeting final days together, no one has made any effort to comfort or even talk about what happened at all. Yes, I am a shut-in, but I still live with my family where I see them every day. I know it’s because no one wants to dig up any pain, either in me or within themselves, but if I didn’t know better, from Tuesday on, it feels like we never even had a dog.

This is the coping mechanism that I was taught as a kid and why I can only discussing emotional issues through my stories that I write to you crickets and the wind. This is why I bury everything and only speak through jokes, which is why I have absolutely no confidence in who I really am. I’ve never been a person to get this type of input or have an outlet when I feel that my output is heard. Even when I was collaborating with directors who wanted to shoot my scripts, the feedback was always surface level. I remember one day walking into a party to hear the tail end of friends talking about a script that I wrote, and then they went silent the moment I walk through the door.

They told me the script was good, but they just had a long discussion about it that they’d share we me soon but never did. All that I got was the usual pleasantries which then made me feel like they were just avoiding having to tell me that I was actually no good. This is how it feels in general. People seem to be impressed with how much work that I put into my efforts, but no one seems to have all that much to say about the actual work. I just tell myself that this is because people are too lazy to read and aside from those friends who avoided the conversation, I’m willing to bet that most of these impressed people haven’t read enough of my work to judge.

The point of all this is to high light how I haven’t really lived a life with any flattery, so this segment of the book about how not to let it get to my head and to just trust yourself is a concept that’s utterly foreign to me. The book added a note about how if you accept flattery then you have to accept the insults as well. So, I guess there’s a benefit to being completely insignificant because I don’t have to deal with the insults as well. I’m not even joking when I say there have been multiple times in my life where I felt like a ghost haunting this earth getting ignored like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, especially during the more self-destructive time in my life where I may have been testing whether or not I’m still here.

Today’s assignment is also flattery-based and is pretty much just a rewording of yesterday’s task only focusing more on the, believe in yourself over needing others to fill any lacking sense of acceptance. Again, having never been externally flattered, I’ve had to develop what the book’s trying to promote by default. I’ll still try to dig deeper into this topic when I check in again tomorrow. Until then, it’s now time to wrap this one up as usual by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.