"What I want to do I do not do"

I'm mad at myself for not doing some things I'd said I'd do--things that I want to do, that I love and that make me happy.

This morning I started to edit a Wikipedia article and had to start at the very beginning. Even though I loved editing W, the last time I did it was 2016. Aargh.
 I have to go through the hassle of relearning it, wishing I'd kept it up all along so I'd already be good at it and working up to another level.

A favorite Bible verse of mine: Paul kicking himself for not doing things he wants to do:

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."
Romans 7:15 (NIV)

I'm not a miserable sinner, I just have all the usual cognitive biases that come pre-loaded in the human brain.
Those are kind of the same thing, in different words--the latter sounds nicer, less judgemental.

The phrase "an evolutionary preference to conserve energy" isn't morally loaded, unlike the word sloth, but it's still a problem, and maybe the same one.
And definitely one I'm not happy to have--not because it makes me a "bad" person, no;
because it keeps me from doing the things I want to do.
How can I work around it?
That's the question.

ANYWAY... what I wanted to edit was the entry on film director Hanelle Culpepper, the first woman to direct a pilot of a Star Trek series––ST: Picard, which I'd liked a lot.

This is a big deal--anything to do with Star Trek is a big deal.
Her Wikipedia bio is barely more than a stub.

Here's Culpepper, below left, with Patrick Stewart as Capt. Picard.

I found her when I went looking for people I could cast in my mind as characters in the Murderbot Diaries, as I read the books (starting with All Systems Red).
I kept getting caught out imagining the characters as white men, which they're mostly not.

Murderbot will say something like, "The hired killers were two heavily armed humans," and I passively fill in some vague version of Rutger Hauer.

Then Murderbot says,
"I throttled the first one into unconsciousness, and then I broke her arm so she'd have something else to worry about in case she woke up."

Right. The hired killers are both women.
I see them as men because that's what they've been in 99 percent of the zillions of hours of stories I've read or watched.

I don't want to change that automatic setting out of some moral or social duty, I want to change it for the sake of BETTER STORYTELLING, a more limber imagination.
As we get older, I see our imaginations can stiffen like old rubber bands, likely to snap if stretched.

Reading Murderbot, I decided to work-out my imagination--really DO THE WORK of loading new images.
That means finding new images.

How many visual images of Black women top-leaders do I have? (Not women married to leaders, like, meaning no disrespect, Michelle Obama.)

Um... Maybe a dozen?

This picture of Hanelle Culpepper made me kind of want to cry because I've never seen it before: a bunch of powerful-looking guys gathered around listening to a woman, a Black woman, give them direction.

And here's Culpepper, framing with authority:

There are a lot of reasons I haven't felt comfortable with taking action or stepping into positions of power--a lot of reasons why I do not do what I want to do.
Some are personal, but some are definitely social, like not seeing, not hearing stories about what that would look like.

I'm not saying anything new here, but once in a while it slams home how we limit one another and our imaginations, our scope, and it's really gut-kickingly tragic.

We could have so many more good stories.

So, back to the grind of figuring out Wikipedia again. Stories aren't just fiction, and it's a storytelling machine.

But first--I'm off to work for the first time since Thursday. Due to dangerous cold, the store isn't opening until noon.
Since it's only supposed to get up to –3ºF, I don't know why we're even opening at all, but it'll be good to move around a little.