Until one day he didn't. This is that story.
Let me tell you about the gutters.
For three years — three years — I told myself I'd clean the gutters tomorrow. Every week they came up. Every week tomorrow was the answer. The gutters became a running joke in my house. They became a symbol of everything I was putting off.
It wasn't just the gutters. There was the gym bag that lived by the front door for eleven days without being opened. There was the junk drawer I hadn't properly dealt with since we moved in. There were phone calls I kept meaning to make, projects I kept meaning to start, conversations I kept almost having.
I wasn't lazy. I want to be clear about that. I had good intentions. I genuinely planned to do things. I just had this remarkable ability to locate tomorrow and park everything there.
"I spent years waiting for the right time. The right time never turned up. It was always somewhere just around the corner."
The shift wasn't dramatic. There was no rock bottom, no lightning bolt, no moment where everything changed at once. It was a Tuesday. Same couch. Same untouched gym bag. Same mental list of things I'd get to eventually.
I just decided to do one thing I'd never done before. One thing. Any thing. Something that would prove, in a very small way, that today didn't have to be the same as yesterday.
I licked a 9-volt battery.
It tasted exactly like you'd expect. My face did things. I filmed it. I posted it. And something happened — not to my follower count, not to my life in any meaningful external way. Something happened internally. I'd done a thing I'd never done. I'd proved that today was different from yesterday, even by the tiniest measure.
The next day I did another thing. And another. And another.
The firsts started small — eating Tim Tams the wrong way, trying to lick my elbow, opening a banana from the bottom. Silly stuff. Stuff that doesn't matter.
Except it did matter. Because every small first was proof. Proof that I could do things I'd never done before. Proof that the gap between wanting to do something and actually doing it was much smaller than I'd made it. Proof that tomorrow could, in fact, start today.
The series grew. The firsts got bigger. The community that formed around it reminded me every single day that I wasn't the only tomorrow person who needed a nudge.