Today I am Writing
Today I am writing, yesterday I was not, the day before I wasn’t either, in fact for a few weeks now I have not sat down to write. I have spent a lot of time thinking about writing, thinking about what not writing means but not actually doing any. I have spent a lot of time getting annoyed with myself for not knowing what to write which has been very counterproductive to the whole writing process. Then I realised that not writing is exactly what I should be writing about.
For me the context here focuses on writing but for you it might be something different so feel free to use this piece to consider how you are showing up for yourself in your own life, the habits you are forming or undoing, and how you are working towards your own goals.
The first day that I didn’t write it was just a day, the second day I didn’t write it became a quiet concern in the back of my mind but I just pushed it away and thought “Don’t worry you will do it tomorrow,” tomorrow came (the third day) and I completely forgot to do it, before I knew it a week had passed and that inspiration I so desperately needed was no where to be found, all I had available to me was frustration and guilt for not keeping the commitment I made to myself. That guilt hasn’t really subsided until now.
As quickly as we form healthy habits we can undo them, if we don’t show up for ourselves and do the things we need to do to drive ourselves forward for a few days in a row we find it even harder to get restarted. We often feel like we need to wait until we feel inspired or motivated to get going again, but what we also forget is that both of those things are created and driven by us. If you wait for inspiration or motivation you will be waiting a long time because you have to do the work to gain both those things.
The biggest challenge for me was then when I did attempt to write I thought I needed to write the most wonderfully profound article or post when actually what I needed to really do was focus on just the habit of writing, the content comes with practice, the most important thing I needed to do was do it. The guilt I had was tricking me into thinking I needed to come back to writing with some huge momentum and pizazz and when I couldn’t do that I felt more guilty. In reality the guilt could be subsided by doing something, even if it was just something tiny like writing a paragraph or even just a sentence.
Today I am writing.
All goals require effort, self motivation, action, determination to do something on your off days even if it is just something tiny. The guilt you feel is from a place of knowing that you maybe aren’t doing everything you can to get to where you need to be, that does not mean that you need to spend everyday trying to be 100% better than the day before, but what if you could do something that offers you a 1% improvement everyday? For me that would be sitting down and writing a sentence rather than writing nothing. Some times we need to just focus on the doing rather than the outcome.
Today I am writing, and tomorrow I will write again, it might not be more than a few words but I will write again.
