Here’s the deal.
Sometimes you sit down and what you write is really good.
Sometimes you sit down and what you write is really bad.
Sometimes you get discouraged and sit down and stare glumly juuuuust to the right of your computer monitor, because you can’t bear the thought of writing.
Why? You have no idea. Because it SHOULD be something you love to do.
I mean, you may say to yourself, as I often do, you quit your day job for this. You have people telling you how lucky you are ALL THE TIME. Stop having so many first-world problems! Jeez.
But you’re tired and uncertain and fearful and weary and you REALLY just feel like going into hiding inside of a hollow oak tree and never emerging.
It’s funny, because you HAVE plans for cases like this. You have a journal that has quippy ideas inside of it — ideas that YOU wrote — that are supposed to obliterate the doubts and the fears. You know fear is a saboteur. You know fear is just another emotion, and that it can be GOOD for your survival, and that you can let it have a seat on the bus — it just can’t DRIVE the bus.
You know this.
What you don’t know is how to act or react when you don’t particularly WANT to be inspired. When you maybe don’t feel like pushing the doubt and fear away and go charging head-first into the unknown for once. Even though it’s what you DO.
What you do appears glamorous and enviable, but in reality… it’s hard and tedious. For every 3 minutes of divinely inspired “Aha!”, there are 97 minutes of “AUGH I AM LITERALLY DYING.”
Sometimes we actively do not want to do the thing we love to do. I’m still figuring that one out. Whether it’s resistance, fear, self-sabotage, or something unknown, we very handily get in our own way.
Even then, we know what we should do: write anyway. But sometimes, even the strongest of us aren’t strong enough for that.