I think I just figured out why it can be so incredibly hard to start writing in the morning.

See, when I’m on a roll or on a tangible deadline, I can get into a rhythm. Wake up and write. Write whenever I have the chance. Push forward.

But most days I don’t have that. And when I’m starting a new piece, it’s particularly hard. I sit down and stare at the screen, and my mind SCREAMS reasons at me not to start writing.

I’m thirsty. I need to get up and move to stretch my back. I have a stack of mail on my desk that needs to be dealt with. There are dirty dishes upstairs. I have something in my other business that needs immediate attention. The taxes shouldn’t wait. The car needs a carwash. I need to cancel an old subscription before I get billed another $9. It’s been too long since I updated my Facebook page. I should review my advertising dashboard; I could be bleeding money while I sit here.

It is a rapid-fire assault, a fricking machine gun of excuses. The fact that I ever start anything in the face of this onslaught is, frankly, a miracle. And it is happening today. Right this moment, in fact, I am giving in to it by writing this post instead of working on the second chapter of SHAUN (working title). I am justifying it by telling myself I’m trying to address the underlying issue, but I still feel guilty as sin.

Recently I started asking myself, “What are you afraid of?” Because clearly, I am scared witless. I can’t think of any other reason I would enter a state of mental paralysis every time I try to do this. For awhile I decided I was scared of success. I had a plan to start pushing books out a little faster, and I must have been scared of actually succeeding at that. Since that was such a stupid fear to have, I felt good about that answer. It made it theoretically easier to push past it, and maybe it worked for awhile.

That ain’t working this morning. Being scared of failure may be a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason.

“But how can you be scared of failure, Adam? You’ve written six books and a bunch of short stories. You haven’t gotten rich off them or anything, but you’ve made more than most. You’ve done this before and you can do it again.” Even that statement, even me making that statement to MYSELF, sounds like an accusation of failure.

It’s funny. Take anything you’d expect I’d be proud of in my writing career, and I can tell you the reason it doesn’t count. ALEX doesn’t count because I didn’t follow it up fast enough and REBECCA didn’t do as well. Finishing half of a million-word epic fantasy series doesn’t count because I didn’t release them fast enough and as a result they haven’t sold well, and the covers aren’t targeted to market. Getting approached about the film rights for ALEX doesn’t count because it didn’t go anywhere either time. Licensing the audio rights to ALEX doesn’t count because I got ripped off. The glowing reviews on CHILDREN OF A BROKEN SKY don’t count because there aren’t enough of them, and I still have reservations about the quality of the book (and, of course, it’s not selling enough—that particular failing is omnipresent for all the work I’ve done).

Hitting word count today doesn’t count because I didn’t hit it yesterday. Hitting my release date target for this quarter won’t count because I didn’t hit it last quarter.

I sit down and look at that blank page and my mind just SHRIEKS about what a failure I am. Not in so many words, of course; it shrouds everything in that barrage of excuses. But the cacophony is deafening. No effing wonder I have trouble getting started.

Maybe it’ll help to rip the excuses away, like I just did, and expose the quivering terror underneath. Maybe it can move to the back of my brain, instead of the forefront, and sit there gibbering quietly while I get the words down. I really want to put out two novels this year.

I just hope to god someone wants to read them.

My daughter told me existence was too big for her.

She is ten years old and is overwhelmed by the inevitability of death, the seeming futility of life, the impossible demand to achieve something so that she can outlast death. Again, she is ten. I was the same at ten — or I would have been, if I hadn’t had the security blanket of heaven.

That’s a security blanket we never let her have, because it can keep you warm, but it can strangle you too. It doesn’t just cover your body; it covers your eyes. And we wanted our little girl to have her eyes open. But with your eyes open, sometimes you see scary things, like the vastness of the universe.

When I became an atheist I struggled with these same ideas. Every now and then I still do. I think about how I’m going to die and turn to dust, and my kids are going to die and turn to dust. The world—the only place of existence I have ever known, the sum total of my experience—will die and turn to dust. It is a suffocating thought. It can kill you if you let it.

Like I so often do, I wrote a book about it to get my thoughts out. Running from it wasn’t working, so I plunged into the reality and inevitability of death, and I managed to find some meaning, if not resolution.

The other morning, when my daughter was gasping for breath as those same relentless waves buffeted her, I knew I owed her something. I had taken her blanket. I owed her something. Whatever I could find.

So I shared with her the same idea that eventually helped me get my feet. It goes like this:

Imagine a vast desert. A place of death so large it has no endings and no barriers. In it you cannot breathe. You cannot survive. There is no food or water or love. It is endless devastation.

And then, somewhere in that horrible place, imagine a little oasis. Water and cool air. Oxygen and family and hugs. A walled place, a place of safety.

Through sheer luck or cosmic providence, we are in the oasis. Right now. And dwelling on death and inevitability is choosing to leave the walls of the oasis and go into the desert, where all we can do is die. We have the power to stay in the oasis. All we have to do is exercise it.

How long will it last? What’s the point if the end is inevitable? Even asking these questions is leaving the oasis. The universe is full of unanswerable questions, and worse, answers we don’t want to hear. We can’t change those answers. But dwelling on them is ignoring the single most beautiful, precious gift the universe gave us: the existence we have at this moment.

I don’t know if it helped her. Later that day she said she had developed her own analogy—not just like mine, but maybe inspired by mine—and now she felt better.

That was enough for me.

The Facebook post is about the slaughtered children in Texas today, and a Democratic Senate candidate going on the air to demand action. Most of the responses are Likes. At least one is a laughing face.

A laughing face.

To the user who posted it, I have to say, your response makes me wonder. How broken, how monstrous, must you be to laugh right now? If it had been your child slaughtered today, would you still find this Democrat’s outrage funny?

It is a particularly brutal response to post publicly, because Facebook, presumably, added that laughing reaction as a way for people to share joy. Laughter is one of the most fundamental of shared human experiences. It can break the tension of a hard situation. It can bring enemies together. It can dispel tears and conquer grief.

To twist it this way, to turn it into a thing of scorn in a time of such deep sorrow, is a repulsive abdication of empathy.

I wonder if you could take a step back and truly examine what it is, exactly, that you find so humorous about this situation. If you could take a look in the mirror and say to yourself: “I am a person who laughs when children are slaughtered.” Is that really something you’re comfortable with? Does there come a point when you realize that perhaps your philosophy has led you astray? That it’s transformed you so thoroughly that empathy and compassion appear to be powers you’ve lost?

Or is the philosophy so ingrained, the indoctrination so complete, that no amount of bloodshed will wipe the smirk from your face?

A friend of mine announced today that he has pancreatic cancer and is in hospice.

And in that bombshell of a sentence, the word I debated using the most was “friend.”

See, I’ve never met this person. I have only ever communicated with him through Facebook. I was introduced to him by a former boss, a person I had a lot of respect for, and even though she was conservative in her views, she saw that we were both secular liberals, and put us in touch. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to know him, he has made me laugh and made me feel less alone. I have come to recognize his name with joy, and respect his words. So even though I’ve never met him, I don’t hesitate to call him a friend—and I don’t even feel the need to add the qualifier “Facebook” to that word.

His communication that he was dying was honest and dignified. He said he accepted what was happening to him, that he was OK with where his journey had brought him. It was a sharp reminder that we should all be so lucky to make the same claim, and an inspiration to this atheist of what I strive for. Happiness, contentment, love. The true meaning of life, the most important things.

I have had family members die that didn’t make me cry, but I cried today for this man I never met. For the reminder that all of us have a time limit, and that all good things come to an end. For the bitter fact that life isn’t fair. Out of gratitude that I live in an age where it was possible for me to meet him without meeting him.

Social media gets a lot of flak, much of it deserved, but it is a force for good as well. Today, as I think about my dying friend, I’m thankful for it. It allowed me to not only get to know this person, but also to experience his last digital words, his acceptance of his fate. That is something I will treasure until my own time comes, when hopefully it will serve me as well as it served him.

I hear a lot about these Parkland kids that are standing up for themselves in the face of both the horrific gun massacre that slaughtered so many of their classmates, and the Republicans’ continued appalling failure to act to prevent more like it. I hear that they are courageous and visionary, and that they are going to rise up and fix this problem. People say this like it’s a good thing.

Are they courageous? Absolutely. Visionary? Certainly.

But I feel like this calculus ignores that they are also terrified. That they were dragged into this fight, literally, at gunpoint.

I love these kids, but I hate that they have to do what they’re doing. They never should have come to this point, because we—YOU and I—should have solved this problem long before it shot their friends to death.

Claiming that “they will solve this problem” is a copout. It is just another way to wait around and hope someone else fixes it. Do they need our support? Yes, absolutely, of course, but the fact of the matter is that WE SHOULD HAVE ALREADY BEEN DOING ALL OF THIS. They should be getting our backs, not asking us to get theirs.

The fact that we claim a bunch of teenagers in Florida are now responsible for solving this problem is ghastly. They aren’t. They are children. Our continued and abject failure to demand change has resulted in a massacre that has altered the course of their lives forever. That is not a cause for celebration. It is a reason for shame.

After Columbine, we should have demanded change—of our laws, of our legislators, and of ourselves. And certainly after Sandy Hook, we should have refused to accept inaction as a possibility; we should have staged a die-in at every state capitol, barricaded doors, swarmed the news, and demanded better laws that would actually protect our children. We spent far too much time waiting to get angry, and we cannot now allow these kids to pick up our slack. We need to pick up our own slack.

Post. Donate. Protest. Call your rep, call your rep, call your rep.

Don’t leave these kids carrying this god-awful burden alone. We failed them once. We should be carrying them now, not the other way around.