This project forced me to look deep into myself and discover what I really wanted. But the most important thing I discovered wasn’t about myself — it was about the impact a project like this can have on you: I experienced firsthand how a daily practice can rewire your brain to think in a different way. Even greater than that, it set me up for my next project, a novel, which I’ve been working on for the past two and a half years.

Three months after I completed A Story Each Day, I found myself working at a startup: a company my best friend and I co-founded, along with a few other friends of ours. We were all under the age of twenty-five, and I’m not going to waste any time telling you how young, naive, and inexperienced we were. But for all our lack of experience, we were fearless, and we believed we couldn’t fail. We tackled every day with an insane optimism, thinking we could do anything.

However, for all of our optimism, we were still inexperienced, and to make things worse, our eager young identities were wedded to our success. Three months after A Story Each Day, I made a small mistake, and shattered my notions of my ability.

In hindsight, the mistake itself (a small text error in a company newsletter) wasn’t really damaging to our company, and I’m now far enough removed from it that I — along with everyone else in the company — can laugh at it. But with our naive exuberance, our identities were tied to the success of our company: my co-founder snapped at me: “Never do that again.”

But that mistake was the beginning of something bigger: because I’d just spent the last year steeped in the practice of developing a narrative from anything and everything, I immediately turned my feelings of this experience into a narrative. This mistake grew in my mind until I could do nothing else but create a character and let the character deal with this dangerous depth of perfectionism. After work that day, I went home and wrote a half-page of notes with an idea for a story. That story became my next novel, which has gone through three revisions, and is now complete.

Since that day two and a half years ago, I’ve been through an extensive process of researching, writing, collecting feedback, revising, and preparing my novel for submission to literary agents. The process itself has been the most thrilling and exciting project I’ve worked on; given me the opportunity to interview mathematicians, daredevils, and professional stuntmen; and taken me to the heights of a hot air balloon, and a 12-story tower crane. (Pictured below).

This novel never would’ve happened if I hadn’t trained myself to think in narratives. The act of writing a short story every single day for a year prepared a way for me to write this novel. Because you shared with me in the journey of A Story Each Day, I want to invite you to share with me in the journey of bringing my first novel to life.

Over the next four months, I’ll be sharing stories about the development of my novel, and sharing updates as I begin taking my manuscript to literary agents.

I hope you’ll stay tuned.

The First Look at my Novel-Writing Process was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, I’m thrilled to release the entire collection of A Story Each Day in an eBook! All 365 stories are available for Kindle, iBook, Nook, and in PDF format.

Click here to get your eBook!

The hardcover copies of A Story Each Day will be available in the coming weeks. If you’d like to get a copy of the hardcover collection, please stay tuned!

It means the world to me to have your support. Thank you!

All the best,

Nicholas Sailer

Quick Question for you — was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is adapted from a talk given by Nicholas Sailer on January 29th, 2016. You can view the talk here.

I’m starting to hate my life, not because I’m a terrible person — I’m not suicidal, and I don’t hate life itself. I’m starting to hate my life, because I have ideas that are in my head, burning and fighting, like small little Olympic gods, cramped inside my skull, and they just won’t stop. They wrestle every night and I can feel them punching each other — It’s not the best feeling, but without them, I don’t feel very much at all.

“Oh, that’s schizophrenia,” I’ve heard before, but no, it’s not. This is different, I’m sure of it. These small little deities aren’t personalities, and if they were, they wouldn’t be my personalities. They have voices, of course (who doesn’t?), but they aren’t my voices. These demi-gods are just ideas, though; they fight each other in a way that would make Charles Darwin proud that he named his theory ‘survival of the fittest’. It’s a beautiful battle, but a bloody one and a horrific one that has no escape, and rarely a resolution.

On the outside, my eyelids twitch because I only got about three hours of sleep last night, but inside my skull, the twitching eyelids are the least of my worries — they’re just the side effects of an all-out, good-and-hardy, down-and-out fist fight. And every so often, they miss each other and hit the back of my eyeballs, causing my eyelids to twitch.

“You should see a doctor.” I’ve heard that before, too. I thought that would solve this little headache issue of mine, so I gave it a try. But I didn’t get a solution, I just got drugs and pills, and ideas don’t like drugs and pills, they like pen and paper. No, I didn’t need a doctor, I needed a new notebook, or better yet, a giant whiteboard where my ideas could splay themselves out across the wall and move the battle onward.

Onward, and upward, more violent and more creative. The battle raged in ways and shapes I never expected. The ideas started to learn karate and tai-kwon-do and archery and fencing and finally I just had to stop them and ask them:

“Where do you guys learn all of this anyway? I don’t know any of this!.”

But of course they didn’t answer, they just kept on fighting until it wasn’t just the twitchy eyelids, but muscle spasms and jittery fingers and achy backs and stiff knees.

Finally, I met a man who shared the same problem — enduring the endless fighting inside the war torn no-man’s land inside his brain. I happened to take a seat next to him on the trolley, and he took one look at me and said: “It’s the ideas, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course, you have them, too?” I said, probably sounding like an excited schoolboy going through puberty. “How do you survive them?”

He looked at me and smiled.

“Oh, I put them all down. They’re under control. The only thing they do now is knock on my door when they’re hungry and I bring them a nice little brown paper bag of groceries, and that keeps them quiet for a while.”

“Oh,” I said, startled quite a bit. And before I had a chance to ask whether or not it was worth it, the trolley stopped and the man got off. Just then, I heard a knocking on the door to my brain, followed by a terrible bang of a grenade going off inside my head.

A nice little brown paper bag of groceries? I thought. You traded your raging ideas for nice little brown paper bag full of groceries?

You traded your sleepless nights, your wild rabbit-hole conversations, your crazed poetry filled stampedes, your ballistic word canons and your semi-automatic illustration sprees and your violent brainstorming escapades and your spontaneous, directionless wandering for peace of mind and a bag of groceries?

I shrugged, and stayed on that goddamn trolley, wherever it was going to take me, my eyes twitching with every stop.

This story was one out of 365 short stories that I wrote in a project that I did called A Story Each Day. I realized in this project that often, I felt more comfortable speaking the language of stories than I did speaking the language of English. I felt most comfortable when I was writing stories. And it brings up this question:

What is your language?

When we commonly think of language, we think: English or Spanish, or French, or German. We think about a collection of words used by a certain country or a certain region. But very rarely do we think about language in the broader definition: A means of communication. It’s not that often that we think of photography as a language, graphic design as a language, or filmmaking, or dance, or painting, or music cooking, or business. These are the languages that I want you to think about.

My discovery of the language of stories started right out of school. I went to the College of Design in Raleigh, in North Carolina, and I was determined that I was going to tell stories through films. I’d made a couple of films in school that were pretty successful, and so like any aspiring filmmaker, I decided I was going to either move to LA or to NY, because that’s what aspiring filmmakers do.

In preparation for this, I started sending my resume out to hundreds of different companies. But I did this during the evening — During the day I worked this absolutely terrible job doing door-to-door political surveys to save up money to move.

I remember the day when I got the first reply to one of my resumes: I was going door to door in some random suburb in Cary (I now have a hatred for random suburbs in Cary, no offense to anyone who lives in a random suburb in Cary), and I got a call from this video production company in Manhattan, saying:

“We like your resume, we want you to start in August, we’ll pay you $40 a day.”

I said yes.

This is the first thing that I want you to take from this article:

Anytime we try to take a step forward in our journey as creative people, anytime we try to learn a language, we have to embrace uncertainty.

We have to have faith.

I had no idea what I was doing moving to NYC. I’d been there once. I had a handful of friends, but I moved into a closet of an apartment with four other people that I’d never met before, with a company I didn’t know, with an internship that paid $40 a day. I packed my life into a suitcase, climbed onto an overnight bus, and got dropped off in the middle of Chinatown the next morning.

Talk about not understanding the language.

When I got to New York, I immediately joined an artist’s group, similar to Creative Mornings, where once a week a new artist would share what they were working on.

One of the artists in particular said something about her process that shifted the way I understood learning this language of stories. It was like the Rosetta Stone for me — I understood my language that much better because of it.

She said that she’d practiced every single day for 25 years. That when she forgot to practice, it felt like she’d skipped a meal. Like something was wrong.

I realized that learning to tell stories, like any filmmaker has to do, is like learning a language. Every creative discipline is like learning a language. If you only practice learning a language, say Spanish or French, once every couple of weeks, or once every couple of months, it’s impossible. You won’t learn that language by practicing that often. It has to be something that you do every single day. If you want to speak a language fluently, you have to practice that language every single day. It has to become part of who you are, not just part of what you do.

So I decided that in the next year, I was going to write one story every single day for an entire year. I was going to start January 1st, and I was going to go to December 31st, and I was going to do this the entire year.

How hard can this be?

I realized that if I had known how difficult it would be, I never would have started.

And this brings me to the idea of faith, once again. I had no idea what I was doing. I had written short stories before, but never anything to this scale. Part of it was this element of faith, not looking at the scale of this project, but only looking at it one day at a time.

I knew I could write one story in one day. And this project was just a matter of having faith that I could continue doing this throughout the entire year.

There are some really beautiful examples of this idea of having faith in a creative project.

I recently discovered this one:

This is the large hadron collider in Europe. When they began the design and planning for this project in the early 90’s, the technology that they knew they would need didn’t even exist yet. They had to move forward and begin the project knowing that they would have to invent it as they went. They had to had faith in their project.

And so in any creative project, anytime you’re learning a new language, whether it’s English, or Spanish, stories, code, business, cooking, anytime you’re creating something out of nothing, there’s always this crucial element of faith that’s necessary to get that project accomplished.

To give you an idea of the process I went through:

Usually, I would write at the end of the day. I would get off my $40 a day internship, and I would scramble onto the subway with these crowds of people in New York, 45 minutes or an hour back to Brooklyn, and I would run up the 5 flights of stairs up to my closet of an apartment with four other people living their lives, and I would sit down and stair at this blank page.

Now — All of you know how difficult it is to have faith in something. I went through this every day, and I know all of you go through this: when you stare at a blank page or a blank canvas, you get this fear that can grip you, and you start to think:

“I have no idea what to write.” “I have no idea what I should draw.” “I have no idea what this business decision should be.”

This is a rough draft from one of my stories. It’s actually really funny, because I would sit down in front of this blank page and if I had no idea what to write, I would literally write the word “Write” until I couldn’t write that word anymore, and I would write a different word, and then I would write that word until I couldn’t write that word anymore and I would write a different word, and I would keep writing different words until it formed a sentence, and use that sentence as a springboard to jump into the story, which is exactly what I did with this rough draft.

It’s really amazing though, because a couple of weeks ago I was looking through my computer and I found this folder of rough drafts. I didn’t even realize how many I had, but I discovered probably 250 rough draft documents. Most of them are just small fragments of ridiculous stuff like this, but it goes to show that element of faith that we all have to have when we go through the creative process on a daily basis.

I know so many of us have faced that blank page, and just decided, “I’m going to keep going”, even when we were afraid of not having anything to say.

Halfway through the project, I got a call from a good friend of mine, and he said “I know you’re working this $40 a day internship. I’m starting a company, and I want you to move back to Raleigh and help me start this company.” And so that’s what I did.

When I moved away from Raleigh, I was so determined and excited to leave. I was so excited to jump into this wild adventure of New York City. So when I moved back to Raleigh, I was faced with a lot of these questions of direction and what I was doing with my life. It was very scary, because there was this similar element of faith in moving back to Raleigh. I had been so excited to leave, and had worked really hard to feel like I was done with Raleigh. It was behind me, I didn’t need to go back. So when I moved back, it really felt like I was returning to something that I’d buried. It felt like I was facing an old challenge again in a new way.

I want to share another story with you. Anytime you’re faced with these big decisions of starting a company or moving to a new city or starting a project like this, these questions find their way into your creative work.

I distinctly remember when I wrote this story. I was going for a run in downtown Raleigh. And I remember looking around at all of the buildings that were going up, and all of the construction that was happening: The old buildings that were being demolished and the new buildings that were popping up and the streets that were being repaved and the streets that were being rearranged.

I remember thinking about all of the change and all of the growth that was happening in Raleigh. And then when I got home, I started to think about all of the change and all of the growth that was happening in my life.

I wrote this story on July 30th, and it’s titled “Lines of Paint in my Mind.”

The streets of Raleigh are marked and lined with construction spray paint — The kind that workers use to denote where electrical wires are buried. Where to dig and where not to dig. Where it’s okay to drill and where it’s not okay to drill, where the water lines run, and where there’s nothing but plain old dirt. Raleigh is growing and expanding by the minute, and by the time one building is finished, they start tearing up the lot right next to it and start something new.

But for every line of construction spray paint that’s put down, it’s inevitable that they’d miss one, isn’t it? Of course it is. Somehow the line of spray paint that was supposed to denote where the main water pipe is on our street never got marked. I woke up one morning, flipped the water on to brush my teeth, and no water came out.

I stepped outside to see a flood of water pouring down our street, turning the road into a shallow river. I looked upstream to see a crew of construction members, staring down into a hole in the ground. One of them held a jackhammer, one of them held a shovel, and one of them held a sandwich. I wandered up to them, still clothed only in gym shorts and an old X-men t-shirt.

“Any idea when the water’s coming back on?” I asked, trying to sound respectful.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” The one with the sandwich muttered, in between bites. “We’re tryin’ to get this thing fixed as fast as we can, but it could take all day.”

“What happened?”

“Idiot didn’t mark it. Marked all the other spots, but the missed this one, so we thought it was clear. Idiot”

I frowned, looking at the steady spring of water shooting out of the ground.

I turned around and went back inside, trying to pretend like I hadn’t missed several vital parts of my morning routine.

While I should’ve been in the shower, or brushing my teeth, or at least on my second cup of coffee, I imagined all of the places where there are missing construction markers, painted onto the ground. The street in front of my house isn’t the only place that doesn’t have markings, telling the workers where they should be going and where they shouldn’t be going. I’m pretty sure that if there is a God, he forgot a couple of spray painted lines in my life.

No doubt, someone as productive as God would be building and growing things all the time, wouldn’t he? He has the entire world to look after, and millions of people asking him for things, every single day. It only makes sense that he’d have someone mark the pavement in the minds of the people he’s working on. And with all of those people, it only makes sense that somewhere, there’d be a line that somebody missed.

So when God finally gets to me, he’d start building full force, knocking down old ruins and drilling down in the dirt of my mind to secure the foundations of whatever the hell he’s building. The street in front of my house isn’t the only place that’s missing some guiding lines of paint, and so for all of God’s good intentions, he hits the main water line, and turns the street in my mind into a river.

My thoughts wash through the street, flooding the sidewalks and rushing over those memories that wouldn’t budge. The secrets that I’d buried years ago become unearthed, and those hidden grudges that I thought were safe and secure wash to the surface. That time that I lied to dad bubbles right to the surface, along with that relationship with that girl that I haven’t talked to in years, but have thought about every day. My mother drifts past, followed by all of the times I ignored her when all she wanted was to get to know her son. They wash by, and I’m left standing in a soggy front yard, surrounded by fragments of trash and litter that I thought were long gone by now.

I stare at the river, rushing through the front lawn of my mind, just wishing I could brush my freaking teeth. I begin to wonder whether or not this was part of God’s plan all along, or whether somebody just forgot to tell him where the water line was.

I wrote this story right when I moved back to Raleigh, about eight months through the project. And about nine to ten months into the project, September, October, and into November, the project started to become really difficult. I faced this uncomfortable feeling of looking at this blank page every single day.

Every single night I would get done with work and rush back to the apartment — and sometimes this way pretty late — sometimes I wouldn’t get to stare at this blank word document until midnight.

But I would face it every single day.

And when I was done, I would go to sleep knowing that when I woke up, I would have to face this blank document again. And then again, the day after that, and again the day after that.

This became a huge challenge. It became really, really scary.

But this is something that you come across in any creative project: You exhaust the easy channels, or the easy stories to tell, or the easy words to learn. You start to run out of ideas that come off the top of your head, and that’s when you really start to stretch yourself.

I felt this every single day. I would sit down and just have no idea what to write.

It got to the point where I would find the most mundane and insignificant details and I would struggle to find a way to tie them to complex narratives and turn them into complex character relationships.

By about nine or ten months in, I actually had people tell me: “Maybe you should just cap this at nine months. This can be a nine month project — it’s nice round number, just cap it at nine months.”

During this time, I came up with one rule. I knew that that if I followed this rule, I would finish the project successfully. It’s very simple:

You can’t go to sleep until you’ve written a story.

So I was really faced with this fear of being able to complete the project, but at the same time, I had another fear start to creep in. Are these stories good enough? Will anyone want to read these stories? It wasn’t just the fear of facing the blank page anymore. It wasn’t just the fear of being able to finish. I started to feel this fear of my stories not being good enough.

As I neared the end of the project, I started to think about what form these stories would take, and I knew I wanted to be able to hold these stories in my hands. No matter how this project ended, that would be enough for me. In November of 2014, I started planning a Kickstarter campaign.

This was tricky, because on top of all of the uncertainty I felt about what I was doing, literary publishing projects are not the most popular Kickstarter projects online. I started doing research into running a Kickstarter: What is the best time of the week to launch a Kickstarter campaign? What’s the best time of day to launch a Kickstarter campaign? What’s the best strategy for launching? How much should I try to raise? What’s the optimal margin per reward? What kind of video should I create?

At the very beginning of December, the last month of this project, I launched the campaign. I was still in the depths of this blank page. And I felt like my stories were getting worse, and worse, and worse. At the same time, I was confronted by this feeling that my stories were not good enough for anyone to read.

Throughout the project, I would mark the stories that I felt I really connected to, or the ones that I felt other people might really connect to. And there was a time, leading up to the Kickstarter, when I’d gone more than a month without marking any of the stories.

And this became more and more of a reality when I realized: People are going to read these stories. My friends are going to read these stories. My family is going to read these stories. People all over the world can read these stories. Even my grandparents can read these stories. Yikes! Do I want my grandparents to read these stories?

This conflict came face-to-face with me a couple of weeks into the Kickstarter campaign.

A couple of days before Christmas, I started getting these emails, one after another. I remember logging in to my email to see my inbox full of people supporting my campaign, and I remembered thinking:

What is happening?

I went to Kickstarter, and realized: My project was on the home page.

Kickstarter just sent my project to thousands of people across the world.

I started getting these messages, one after another, from people all across the world, telling me:

I can’t wait to read your stories. I can’t wait to get your book.

To get to a place where your language is being spoken in the most authentic way, you have to speak with faith.

You have to forget that anyone will ever see what you’re creating.

If you want speak your language with authenticity, whether it’s the language of storytelling, or the language of music, or art, or business, or photography, or filmmaking, you have to forget that anyone else will ever see it, and you have to speak it in faith.

The Secret to Creating Authentic Work was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

The mountain in the distance beckons him with its presence. It calls out, in a low and hidden voice that few hear. But he hears it, and it challenges him, with a whisper:

“Climb.”

He looks up at the mountain, uncertain and insecure.

Few have faced it, or even considered attempting to scale the height of this horizon, hewn from the sky itself. Impossible. Foolish. But the impossible scrapes his mind, and he finds himself confusing foolishness with confidence far more than anyone else, and far more than he probably should.

So he decides, one day, that there is only one response to the jagged cliffs of stone and the scathing heights of the massive peak. He can only imagine the view from the summit. But he’s got a good imagination.

It stands, casting a shadow over his home every single day. Finally, one day, he tells his father:

“I’m going to climb that mountain in the distance. The one that rules over the valley, I’m going to climb it.”

His father turns to him, and faces him with a confused and defiant countenance. He doesn’t doubt him, he doesn’t argue with him, or try to dissuade him. He just questions him, in a low, soft whisper:

“Why?”

And although the boy knows that the real reason to climb is to reach for something higher, to discover something that was once unknown, he just answers:

“Because it’s there, and it’s calling me.”

His father shrugs, and shakes his head.

The boy tells his mentor:

“I’m going to climb that mountain in the distance. The one that rules over the valley, I’m going to climb it.”

His mentor nods his head, with a quiet hint of regret, as if he had once sought the same challenge, the same discipline. Finally, he replies, quietly:

“You’re just a boy. Enjoy where you are, what you are, and forget what lies afar. The horizon holds contests that will eat at your mind and tear from you anything else.”

The mentor’s words seep into the boy’s head, like rain into the cracks of an ancient stone. But the beckoning of the mountain was there first.

The boy tells his friend:

“I’m going to climb that mountain in the distance. The one that rules over the valley, I’m going to climb it.”

But his friend laughs:

“You’re foolish. Your words won’t carry you as far as they carry your pride. The mountain is impossible to climb, incredible to summit — that’s why the mountain is there, and you’re down here. Don’t waste your time.”

The boy bears the burden of these words: the questions, the challenges, the doubts, the uncertainties. Each of them tight and terse, like a rope tying him down to the floor of the valley.

But there lies still a conflict within him.

“It is impossible,” he agrees. “That’s why I have to try. Impossible things are only made of hundreds of attainable things, and each step is just as possible as the step before it.”

He invites each of them, his father, his mentor, his friend, his family members, to watch him as he embarks. He doesn’t carry much — it’s not the accessories that accompany him that will help him reach the summit.

But he gathers a rope, and a coat, and a flag for when he reaches the top. Early in the morning, he tightens the laces of his boots around his feet, and carries himself through the dawn of the valley to the foot of the mountain.

No one comes to see him leave, no one is there to see him off, but he takes no mind. He takes the first step.

His eyes are ahead.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

His Eyes Are Ahead was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

My children and grandchildren come to my house to visit me. They smile at me, and my wife smiles back. She asks the grandchildren to guess how old I am, like age is a number she hides behind her back for amusement and games. Both of my grandchildren guess.

And so do I, because regardless of how hard I grasp onto my memory, it slips between my thoughts.

I tell them:

“I’m 80.”

But my wife says:

“No, you’re 83.”

I shrug, because I guessed wrong.

Why do I not know my own age? Isn’t it strange that this fact, so intimate yet so public, eludes me? Not to me, not right now. It is strange, but I don’t realize it.

They ask me to play something on the piano, and I agree, but I can’t walk to the piano alone. My daughter-in-law holds my hand, and leads me to the parlor, where the piano hides. The old, rickety piano bench creaks and groans as I sit.

I only remember how to play one piece, but I play it pretty well. At least, I think I do. I don’t really know.

My fingers quiver as I touch the keys.

My memory fails me. I know this. I’m not ignorant, but my awareness hides from me, quietly, like the fading of the final, sustaining chord. I stop in the middle of the song, and pause. I turn around, as if I want one of them to help me finish the song, but honestly, I don’t know why.

“Great job!” My daughter-in-law prompts, uncomfortably. My grandchildren turn to me, confused. The song remains frozen, incomplete.

“He’s not finished,” my wife says. “Let him finish.”

She turns to me, and whispers:

“Go ahead.”

I can’t do anything alone. I can’t walk alone. I can’t sit alone. I can’t stand alone. I can’t urinate alone, or bathe alone. The one thing I thought I could do alone — remembering this song — I realize now, I can’t. I’m dependent, eternally dependent. But aren’t we all?

I’m dependent on the keys of the piano, on this stupid, rickety bench, on the clothes on my back, on the glasses in front of my eyes, on the light from the lamp that illuminates the keys.

When I was young, I thought that the older I got, the less help I would need. My infant mind couldn’t wait for my parents to place me down and for my legs to learn to walk. My hands couldn’t wait to grasp a pencil; my tongue couldn’t wait to form sounds. My infant mind couldn’t wait for independence. My pre-pubescent mind couldn’t wait to be like my older brother, independent and virile; my adolescent mind couldn’t wait for the freedom of a vehicle. My eyes couldn’t wait to see what I wanted to see, and not be restricted by what was expected.

My idealistic mind couldn’t wait for my mentors and instructors to let me go, and for my own skills and talent to carry my weight. My paternal mind longed for days when I wouldn’t need help figuring out how to be a father, or a husband, or the son of an aging parent.

I wanted to be my own person. I wanted to bear my own weight; I wanted to stand on my own two feet. Not because I’m selfish, no, but because I’ve lost everything that I’ve depended on far too much.

My fingers clunk and tap against the smooth, ivory keys, and I end the song with a wrong note that tries to hide itself inside the final, sustaining chord. Memory is one of those things I’ve lost because I depended on it far too much.

I let the chord fade away, like my awareness. I look around, at my family, at my children and grandchildren. They clap and smile, and I clap and smile right along with them, then forget what we’re celebrating. But it doesn’t matter; I keep on clapping.

At that moment, full of naïve mirth and my own ignorance, I give up. There’s no sense in trying to be independent, there’s no sense in refusing that intricate reliance. I’m eternally dependent, eternally reliant on my family, my friends, my wife; on my memory, my piano, my clothing, my shoes, and my pencil. And on that stupid, rickety piano bench. I’m reliant on the lamp to give me light, on my eyes to see, on my feet to stand, on my hands to grasp.

I always have been dependent, interwoven, inextricably knit to the people and things around me. And I bear no doubt, and no regret, that I always will be.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

The Final, Sustaining Chord was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

When I sit down at a Steinway, in front of an audience of a thousand people, some of whom have paid more than a hundred and fifty dollars to see me play, there are many things on my mind. The best teachers tell me to forget everything. They tell me to forget everything but the music I’m about to play.

The more interesting instructors tell me to think about the first time the piece was played, like that’s supposed to give me a fresh perspective. By this point, I’ve played that piece thousands of times. I’ve hammered it into my skull until I can play it in my sleep. It’s not as amusing as it sounds.

I step out onto the stage in the same way, whether it’s the first time I’ve played, or the hundredth, or whether I’m playing at Carnegie, or my studio. The same hint of fear seeps into my blood, and reminds me that there are eyes watching.

And that’s the challenge.

I’m not afraid of the piano. A Steinway has never hurt anyone; it’s far too beautiful to do that. I’m not afraid of what I could do, or what I’ve done. I’m not even really afraid of making a mistake.

I’m afraid because, every time I step onto the stage and sit down at the piano and place my fingers on the keys, I’m making a statement: a statement about reality, about my beliefs, about what beauty is and is not. Carving sound from silence utters a declaration about who I am — and from that emerges a declaration about the rest of life.

Early on as a pianist, I fell into the emblematic dream of standing naked in front of a crowd. I felt ashamed to admit I’d had it, but dreams exist to help you understand reality, and there was no other way for my mind to communicate this fear to me. Walking onto a stage and making your beliefs public reveals your fears. It exposes your hopes. It emphasizes your flaws, and accentuates your imperfections.

My instructor was one of the best. He encouraged me to forget everything, and just play. But I was never able to do that. I’m sure he realized that I failed to follow his instructions, even though I lied plenty of times. A couple of times, I was almost sure he believed me.

But the last time, I couldn’t escape the eyes; I couldn’t escape the audience. I couldn’t escape my family, or my friends. It was like I was living in that dream, that naked dream, except I never woke up.

My instructor must have realized this. I mean, he did realize this, because he tried all kinds of things to try to make me forget. He made me play in the dark, and in broad daylight. He shipped a piano out to the middle of an open field, and made me play there. He placed a piano in the middle of Times Square, and made me play, with all of those damn tourists watching. But none of it helped.

The day approached, just like the day I mentioned earlier: an audience of a thousand people, some of whom had paid more than a hundred and fifty dollars to see me play.

I stepped out onto the stage. My mind tore at me, naked and raw. I saw my instructor behind the curtain, piercing me with his eyes. I waited for him to do something to make it easier for me to play — flip a light off, or pull a curtain. But he didn’t. He just mouthed the words:

“Forget everything.”

I couldn’t.

But I shut my eyes, and started playing.

I felt every eye tear into my mind. Into my ideas, my fears, my hopes. My insecurities, my flaws, my mistakes and grudges. I felt every eye cut deep into me: the eyes of family and friends, the eyes of strangers and lovers. They drowned me with their judgment, as I struggled to breathe music into my lungs.

I finished the piece, and held the keys down until the sound faded into the corners of the majestic hall. The roar of applause filled my ears.

I opened my eyes.

And saw that I was absolutely alone.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

Play was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I can’t do this.”

You may have felt this sentiment at some point in your life, about any number of things. Maybe you realized what you were about to do was wrong, or that there was a much better alternative, or maybe you just changed your mind and threw it all out the window. On this bright, sunny afternoon, Jack experiences all of these.

“I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this!” he yells, and his voice wavers over the deafening roar of the plane, rushing 12,000 feet above the earth. The weight of his parachutes clings to his torso, and he shakes, violently.

He looks back at his instructor.

I’m sure you know that feeling — the feeling of biting off more than you can chew. It’s not an enjoyable feeling, because there aren’t many ways out of a situation like that one.

“Just do it, man!” the instructor yells.

The instructor had always struck Jack as a nice, responsible person; and he’s fairly certain this man wouldn’t tell him to do something unwise. The instructor uses the “Adrenaline Encouragement” tactic — prompting Jack to make a decision in the heat of the moment, purely on adrenaline, but Jack shakes his head.

“Come on, man! You got all the way up here, just jump! Don’t think about it!”

This bothers Jack, because the notion of not thinking about something sounds like a very bad approach to throwing oneself out of an airplane.

The instructor tries peer pressure:

“You wouldn’t want to get back and say that you couldn’t jump, would you? Think about what everyone else would say!”

But that doesn’t work either. Jack is stubborn, and there’s not much that he feels would make him embrace the vast weightlessness of free falling in the sky.

The instructor tries reminding him of the expense:

“C’mon, man! You already paid for it. If you don’t do it, you don’t get your money back!”

But Jack just shrugs. $245 dollars isn’t enough to make him jump. Why would it be? Money is an entirely poor motivator when fear is involved, and jumping out of an airplane is no exception to this rule.

This frustrates the instructor. He keeps his composure, but the tone of his voice is harsh:

“You need to jump. You came this far, you have to jump.”

Jack looks out the window, at the 12,000 feet of space below him.

“This is your chance, Jack. If you don’t jump in the next twenty seconds, you’ll miss your window. You probably won’t ever get this chance again. Jump.”

Jack looks back at the instructor.

Eighteen, seventeen, sixteen…

He questions himself: Why would I ever do something this stupid? Why would I get myself into this situation? Why did I think it would be fun, or cool, or exciting to do this? What was I thinking?

Twelve, eleven, ten, nine…

Jack shakes his head, and leans away from the window. He can’t bring himself to jump. He yells, once again:

“I can’t.”

Seven, six, five…

“Why not?”

Four, three, two…

“I’m afraid.”

The instructor pushes Jack out of the plane, because fear is a terrible reason to not do something.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

Fear of Falling was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

The tree in the yard grew vibrantly, upward toward the sky. Its limbs stretched and reached brilliantly, as if to ask:

“Sky, sun, rain, and earth — make me into something great!”

The flowers and the shrubs around the tree watched in awe, waiting, with fresh leaves and strong roots, for this tree to become something great, as they all knew that it would.

The young gardener boy who had planted the tree arrived early one morning, just as winter began to fade and spring began to arrive. He circled the yard, pruned some of the shrubs, picked some of the flowers, and came to a halt at the tree.

The tree had yet to sprout fruit from its branches. But the young boy was patient. He watered the tree, and decided to come back the next season when the tree had developed enough to bear fruit.

Over the summer and into the fall, the whole garden grew, and watched the tree grow, despite its barren branches. Through the scorching heat of midsummer evenings, and the shivering cold of the early year, the tree reached up to the sky, as if to plead:

“Sky, sun, rain, and earth — make me into something great!”

The next season, the young boy returned. He circled the yard, pruned the shrubs, picked the flowers, and came to a halt at the tree.

The branches had grown, and hung just over his head, but still, no fruit had emerged from the ends of the limbs. The boy shrugged, pulled out a bag of fertilizer, and spread the rich, heavy soil at the base of the tree. Once the roots were nearly suffocating in nutrients, he stood, brushed the dirt from his hands, and left.

The tree felt stilted as it grew, into the summer and over the fall. It felt outpaced, and unprepared for growing. But the rest of the garden watched it attentively, waiting for fruit to emerge. And yet, it never did. January came quickly, and the tree’s naked branches reached for the white sky, yearning and pleading for something more than itself.

The young boy returned the next season, but instead of circling the garden, he went straight for the tree. He yelled and muttered in disappointment, and kicked the tree’s trunk in anger. The thin, fast-growing bark split open, and the young boy paused, in an instant realization.

He left quickly and returned with shears and clippers. He set up a step stool, and climbed up to prune the branches.

“There,” he said, when the tree had been pruned. “That will teach you to grow fruit. You’re meant to grow fruit. I know this, because I planted you, I did.”

The boy left, and the tree hung, sadly and silently, with sap dripping from its muted branches. But the garden grew forward, into the New Year. The tree slowly recovered, and by the next season, it had renewed itself.

The boy arrived once more, and cursed the tree as he saw the naked branches.

“I planted you, ” he said, with contempt in his voice. “Why won’t you grow fruit, like you should?”

But his anger was short lived. He disappeared and returned quickly, with tape and a knife and a handful of fresh, green branches. The tree watched as the boy sliced into the limbs and grafted on the twigs of another tree. He dumped loads of fertilizer at the base of the tree, stood, and left.

The garden seemed to stretch and warp in the tension of the season, but not compared to the tree itself. The fertilizer accelerated the tree beyond health and beyond movement, and its bark cracked with the explosion of growth. The tree stretched and screamed, but no fruit grew.

The young boy returned to the garden the next season, and his eyes fell in disappointment. The tree stood, torn and stilted, with barren limbs and awkward grafts.

The boy grabbed his axe and called for others to join him. He pointed to the tree, but the other men corrected him, and pointed to the ground around the tree.

He dropped the axe, and retrieved a shovel. He sunk the shovel deep into the earth, to loosen the tree from the ground.

His shovel hit something, hidden in the dirt. He knelt to examine it.

Juice from a bright red fruit spilled into the dirt, split open by the shovel blade. He cleared the dirt to see a vast network of berries, clinging to the roots: Bright, vibrant, and alive.

The freshly awakened smell of the subterranean fruit met his senses.

He stood and threw the shovel aside.

The tree in the yard had grown, vibrantly, upward and down, to become what it was meant to be.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

Upward & Down was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

My wife and I keep a collection of some of the funniest things that our seven-year-old boy has said over the years.

At the pool, he pointed to my chest and asked: “Daddy, why is a beard on there?”

After explaining to him that owls are nocturnal, he turned to me and confirmed: “Yes, daddy, owls are not turtles.”

But one day, my seven-year-old boy walked up to me after work and asked me:

“Daddy, are you happy with your life?”

I kid you not. I don’t know how he comes up with these things. The question caught me off guard, and I was so surprised that I answered: “Of course.”

He went on with his content seven-year-old existence, and left me to stir in thought over what I’d just told him. I thought about it, then felt a little guilty for lying, so quickly resolved to make it true (because, it’s not lying if it becomes true, right?)

I spent the next four years quitting as many unhappy things as I could. I quit my stale, rotten, cubicle job. I started exercising, starting my days with a five-mile bike ride. I found a job that I enjoyed, doing exactly what I’d always dreamed of doing.

By this time, my boy was twelve years old. He wandered up to me one day, and asked:

“Daddy, are you rich?”

That question surprised me, too, and I instantly blurted out:

“Yes, of course we are.”

He just smiled, and I realized that he’d probably brag about it to all his friends at school the next day. I thought about that for a while, and felt a little guilty for lying. So I resolved to make it absolutely true (because it’s not lying if it becomes true, right?).

I quit my dream job, and found another — one that would make us wealthy one-percenters. I sold our crummy little house and bought one of those enormous houses just outside the city, with a pool, and a tennis court in the back. I filled the rooms with high-end furniture and massive flat-screen TVs.

Years passed. My son neared high school graduation, and began applying to colleges. Harvard, Yale, NYU, Duke, Stanford. But a sliver of insecurity and skepticism slid under his skin. He asked me:

“Dad, are you ‘educated’?”

“Of course,” I answered without hesitation, but before I even spoke I knew it was a straight-faced lie. He seemed content with my answer, and even though he didn’t get a scholarship, he attended Stanford in the fall.

Once again, his question drove me to conviction, and I found myself applying to all the same schools: Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Duke. I attended graduate school the next fall.

Three more years passed, and we both crept closer to graduating and entering the real world as educated members of society. I spent my spring, summer, and autumn focused and determined, driven my make my claim true. My voicemail grew full, my inbox swelled, but my grades increased, and that was all that mattered. I graduated with a PhD in Economics. Finally, in the depths of the most chaotic week of my life, as I was running late for that stupid graduation ceremony, he called me and asked:

“Dad, are you there?”

I was able to answer honestly, and truthfully, maybe for the first time in my life. I pulled my car over on the side of the road, and muttered through tears:

“Yes, I’m here.”

I didn’t get to graduation on time that day, and I missed being awarded my diploma.

But I got something else.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

Parental Ambition was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of A Story Each Day

I wade through the Christmas morning obstacle course, around the scattered toys and books and abandoned candy canes. I grab a crumpled ball of wrapping paper and stuff it deep inside an overflowing trash bag full of tinsel and tape and cardboard packages. When the bag begins to overflow, I stuff the last handful of Christmas cheer into its plastic prison and tie it shut.

My siblings were happy to have me home from school, for the first hour. They then promptly forgot that they hadn’t seen me in months, and returned to bickering, sugar cookies, and singing Christmas carols out of tune. I sift through the aftermath of their Christmas morning, and clean up the wreckage. I head for the door.

“Don’t forget the crockpot,” my mother calls, “Take it to the dumpster, too.”

I carry the overfilled garbage bag and the old crockpot outside to the dumpster, into the cold, wet December afternoon. I consider how funny it is that my mother received this fine kitchen appliance on this same day, a year ago, and it has somehow already found its way to the dumpster. I open the lid and toss it in, along with the wrapping paper, the packages, the candy canes, and tinsel. I look up the street, at the soggy paper luminaries.

Everything is on its way out, isn’t it? I like being surprised when a kitchen appliance lasts more than a year, but why am I surprised in the first place? It’s almost like everything is just in a different state of being thrown away. Everything is going to get trashed; it’s just a matter of time.

How long will it be before we trash that brand new coffee maker we unwrapped this morning? Or the iPad? Or the new set of coffee mugs? How long will those things last? Five years? Ten? Twenty years?

I pull my brand new scarf and sweater tighter over my shoulders, and hesitate, before going back inside. I wonder, how long until I throw them out, too? How long before I tear a hole in the sweater, or the scarf gets lost?

Everything is just in a different stage of being thrown out, I’m sure of it. Everything is headed for the trash — the only difference is the amount of time it takes to get there. And that’s scary as hell. What is not going to end up in the trash, eventually? Anything?

My mind wanders, and I step back inside. My younger siblings clamber around the TV, eating candy canes and sugar cookies, watching Linus Van Pelt monologue about Christmas trees needing love.

Maybe that was it. Maybe this cliché answer of “Love and Christmas Cheer” is the one that won’t end up in the trash. Maybe love is the one thing that’s not on a path to the landfill. Maybe the Beatles really were right, and it’s as simple as that. If that were true, though, I think we would have better answers for everything.

“Watch Charlie Brown with us!” my little sister yells at me, as I turn to leave. There’s no escaping my siblings. When they want something from me, it’s as good as theirs. So I sit down beside them, and watch Lucy Van Pelt declare Charlie Brown a completely hopeless loser.

It’s not love. Love is erased when everything melts. Love is dependent on the people who carry it, the people who nurture it, the people who use it. My sister leans her head against me, and I understand that there is only one thing not destined for the trash.

Family.

That’s cliché, too. Almost as cliché as love. But it seems inarguable. Even when you’re in the ground, there’s no way to become unrelated to your siblings, or your parents, or your children. There’s no way to disconnect from them. You’ll always be family to them, and they’ll always be family to you, whether or not you like it. You can try to forget them, or disown them, or escape them, but they’re always there.

It’s in your DNA, and no escaping that.

“Do you wanna watch the Grinch with us?” my little sister asks me, as Charlie Brown ends.

I smile.

“Sure.”

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend it!

A Story Each Day is a collection of 365 stories, written daily in 2014 by Nicholas Sailer.

Family was originally published in A Story Each Day on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.