My thighs are 6 inches thicker than they were two years ago. My waist, on the other hand, is just 3 inches thicker. But still. At this point ANY additional thickness is completely unacceptable.

What does this mean? Maybe I’m a tad overweight. I don’t even know my actual weight, or the healthy average for my height/size. (In case you don’t personally know me, I’m 5’10″ and Italian. Translation: tall and lanky would not be an accurate description of me. I’ve often mused about how to calculate the weight of my breasts individually and subsequently their combined percent of my total weight. But that is a digression on which we need not dwell.)

Even if I am slightly heavier than I should be for my height/size, you probably wouldn’t describe me as “fat” if you saw me, and I most certainly am not obese. (Anyone seen “The Biggest Loser” lately?) Why then, when I measured my thighs for the first time in two years last week, did the extra 6 inches send me into this downward spiral of fear and self-loathing? Correction: it’s 6 inches per thigh, for a total accrual of 12 inches. Also known as 1 foot.

For the record: I don’t know any woman (or man for that matter) in her right mind who would be comfortable with the knowledge that the widest part of her body was now AN EXTRA FOOT WIDER. Heck, I wear as size 10 shoe, and my feet are literally one foot long. How’s that for perspective?

I certainly am not comfortable with being an extra foot wider. So I decided to punish myself by getting up at 6:30 a.m. to work out with my good friend Jess, who routinely kicks my ass at the gym. Example: I ride my bike to the gym (1.7 miles). Depending on what time I get there, I will walk/jog another 0.5-1 mile on the treadmill. Then stretch. Then do any number of exercise combinations including (but not limited to): lunges, planks, squats, burpies, abs, and all kinds of weights and conditioning for every muscle imaginable, which I would list to further emphasize my point, but I don’t even know the names of the muscles that hurt.

I hurt. Plain and simple. Every time I make even the slightest movement, I hurt. Typing hurts. Sitting hurts. Walking hurts. I just hurt.

Why do I punish myself so? Because somehow in the past 2 years, I have allowed myself to expand by one foot. One foot, I tell you.

Gross.

But — what does this mean? What is the larger significance of these 12 inches?

Those 12 inches symbolize horrible, awful things that I despise: Complacency. Indifference. Overworked. Underpaid. Over-committed. Undervalued. Procrastination. Laziness. Carelessness. Unmotivated. Apathy. Sub-par.

Yet, I have succumbed to those things, and I carry them around with me every day. Somewhere along the way, slowly, over the course of the past 2 years, I have lost sight of things that are important to me, and I now have an extra foot.

A friend asked me just last week for the best piece of advice I could give to a person who wanted to be a better writer. My response?

Don’t be afraid to write shitty first drafts. (Disclosure: this is not a new concept.)

On the first day of every semester, I hand my students an excerpt from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird called “Shitty First Drafts.” This is especially effective in freshman comp, and not just because I am saying the word “shit” on the first day of class (the students never fail to snicker when I say it), but because most 18-year-olds these days come to college programmed with the 5-paragraph-essay formula. What a horrible, horrible thing to program high school students with.

Sometimes I even make them read an essay called “Un-teaching the Five Paragraph Essay.” But that tends to be a bit over their head, what with the pedagogical theory and all. They just want me to tell them what to write about, tell them how to write it and then tell them how to fix it.

Sounds kinda like the simplified version of the 5-paragraph essay: Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em.

Except not every writing problem can be solved with the 5-paragraph formula.

Look!

I’m already on paragraph number 8 and, what do you know? One of those paragraphs is only one sentence long, and another is only (gasp!) one word!

Whatever is an 18-year-old in freshman comp going to do with that? Worse yet, what is a 30-something grad student who never un-learned the 5-paragraph essay going to do?

Write shitty first drafts, I say!

When I talk to people who say they have a “hard time writing,” most often it’s because they won’t get out of their own way. It’s the perception that as soon as something is written, it has to be perfect and final. But nothing is farther from the truth.

Here’s the thing: if you want to improve your writing, you have to have some writing to improve. There is nothing to improve on a blank page. So get some shit down on the page, and then work on improving it. It really is that simple. As long as you let yourself write some shit. YOU have to let yourself write some shit.

I’m not saying it’s easy. But I am saying that if you can be OK with less-than-perfect even for just a little while, your writing will improve exponentially.