After a nearly 9-month hiatus from publishing anything on this platform, I’m returning with renewed dedication. I’d like to pretend I was on a Ulysses-like sabbatical, collecting fodder and adventures to share with a patient and attentive audience when I returned to my home…office.
In reality, I have a gestation period of excuses.
Some of them are legitimate. Some are a stretch. All of them have something in common: RESISTANCE. Steven Pressfield is right–that shit will stop at nothing less than total annihilation. Fighting resistance is a daily battle, whether we recognize it or not.
Here is an abbreviated list of my most recent excuses. See if you can relate to any. Some are sneaky AF and are often resistance masquerading as reasons to not do the work (in my case, write).
- New job
- New cat
- Sleep
- Covid
- Travel
- Ted Lasso
- Depression
- Home organizing
- Family obligations
It started with a new job I took last spring. What I thought would be a fun, part-time side gig turned out to be an all-encompassing demand that encroached on every other facet of my life. My daily writing time was supplanted with early morning dramas (beyond my pay scale), late night texts (this could have been an email!), and frequent troubleshooting calls to customer service.
Even my dinners and weekend getaways were sabotaged by unscheduled work-related calls and crises beyond the purview of my job description. So, writing slipped to the bottom of the to-do list each day, often for different reasons.
That part-time, life-consuming side hustle swallowed up six months of my year before I pulled the ripcord, looked for work with a more predictable schedule, and threatened to reclaim a daily writing routine.
And I did…sort of.
During the month of November I attempted an experiment in the vein of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write a 50-thousand-word manuscript in 30 days. I have attempted this several times, only reaching the word count goal once. I don’t think I actually want to write a novel. But I do want to write.
I made a pact with my inner scribe to write one blog post draft per day during the month of November. I promised myself I would go back and edit them all as necessary and publish them when they were each good and ready.
By November 30, I did compose a dozen drafts, all of which have yet to undergo an editing process and join its published brethren. By now the freshness and essence of immediacy have faded. The nature of conversational blogging differs from long-form novel writing in more ways than I suspected.
Time is of the essence with regular posts or daily news, which leaves little room for perfectionism. One reason I’m drawn to this medium is that it challenges my meddling analysis paralysis and encourages the adage “done is better than perfect.”
(That quote is attributed to Sheryl Sandberg, but I can’t believe she was the first ever to have uttered it.)
At some point you may see those months-old drafts polished up and making their debut, but for now I’m sticking with real time and following the advice of many artists and writers far wiser and more successful than I.
Elizabeth Gilbert covers this topic extensively in her TED talk and nonfiction book Big Magic, sharing stories about creative inspiration–from poet Ruth Stone to singer/songwriter Tom Waits to Gilbert’s own experience with fellow writer Ann Patchett.
If dreams deferred dry up, neglected muses can wander off and seek companions elsewhere.
My formerly fresh list of topics and unexplored ideas now look wilted, three months later. I failed to feed, water, and nurture them when they needed, rather than when I felt ready. And I may never feel ready. As a result, several have withered on the blogging vine. Someone else may have caught hold of them and will do the topics greater justice than I ever could, or at least did in recent months.
So, here we are. Again. Another day, another attempt, another topic, another post.
In the midst of work and writing transitions and false starts, I adopted a new cat. My husband (and our friends and neighbors) and I have bid Coco adieu and welcomed Pele into our home. You’ll see updates on her soon.
Oh yah, and I got Covid for Christmas and spent the last week of 2021 quarantining and sleeping like a champ.
The last nine months have been a wild ride! I look forward to sharing more of it with you. Instead of resistance pretending to be life keeping me from writing, I plan to use that raw material for inspiration and keep my arse in the writer’s seat.
Astrid Lium 