Dear friends I haven't met yet,
I've had to wrestle with something hard this month, and really, for several months. While I love to write, I encounter resistance and severe anxiety when I try to write every day.
The pattern goes like this and can be seen in the spreadsheet below: I get hyped and have an explosion of writing, usually in November or around July, and write a good chunk of a novel over a couple of weeks. Then I burn out and it doesn't happen again for a while. If I manage to write at all in between, it's only about the length of a Wikipedia article in an entire month. The more I've forced it to happen every day, the less I seem to write (and the less I want to write,) and the more infrequently the writing bursts happen. It seems like it'd be more efficient to just let the writing bursts happen as they do.
What I'm dealing with is "what about the habit?" Even the most lax definitions of writing success I've seen—and I've seen a lot, from King to Kieffer—involve making a habit out of writing. Thing is, this hobby I enjoy is becoming unenjoyable when I try to make it a daily habit. That actively goes against my goals and against my readers. But because of the expectations against me, and wanting, as a disabled person, to be able to say I'm DOING something, I'm having a hard time letting go. The string of zeroes in this year's spreadsheet haunts me.
So how do I go forward? Well, I have two options: give up the habit completely in favor of organic bursts only, or lower my expectations and goals for a habit—perhaps just one scene a week or once a month, just something so I can say I'm making steady progress. Even though it'd probably be better for my writing if I didn't, I'm currently leaning the latter because I just can't let go.
Before I make that decision, though, here's what I'm going to be focusing on instead (and what I've been working on this whole time):
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Spiritual habits. I was going to be working on these regardless, with things like daily oracle reading (similar to tarot) and meditation. Oracle readings have been going well.
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Making old habits better. Thanks to new insights and instructions from my dental team, I need to change my lifestyle before I can brush my teeth safely and regularly again, for instance.
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Improving my bullet journal. I've been experimenting with ways to get the best, most practical use out of my only form of planning, making my weeks and months look different. In short, trying to use space wisely.
I'll try to keep y'all updated on how these goals go as the year goes on.
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