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Wednesday, April 19, 2017

a post about writing

My life coach pretty much threw down the gauntlet. We were talking yesterday about my writing and I was complaining about my writing - it is at the very core of who I am, but it is at the fringes of what I actually do every day. I was hoping she would give me some kind of a magical cure for my conundrum and I don't know, maybe in a way she did - but what she said was "maybe, in this season, you don't really WANT to write." These words have lit a fire within me to prove her wrong.

I struggle struggle struggle to make myself do the things that I think are the most important. In some ways I'm not much of a fighter, I'm actually kind of a pushover and I give into resistance pretty easily. So setting boundaries on writing time (not just the very last few minutes of the day, or whatever the rest of my family doesn't need - like these ones) is murder for me. Laying down the "no" to whatever it is in order to say "yes" to writing is just. so. hard for me.

As I was brushing my teeth I had a mini-epiphany and it was long enough that I felt like I needed to write it down somewhere - thus the blog post. So here you go. Here are my top reasons why I'm not writing that are all in my head:

the lie of scarcity
I feel like I have about five minutes of quality time in which to write - whatever I write during those five minutes had better be "the right thing". Um, no. Exhibit A - Elizabeth Gilbert. She'd written a few things here and there about this and that before she published her unexpectedly, wildly successful book of memoir called "eat pray love" and now she has a very popular book on creativity called "Big Magic". She has written things in between these two big hits that have ranged everywhere from mildly successful to total flops. That wasn't wasted time. It's true that I'll make less progress if I work on a bunch of different projects all at once - but I don't need to put all of my eggs in the basket of this project I'm currently working on. It'll be accepted or it won't be. All I can do is write it and keep writing it. Then I'll move onto writing the next thing. One of these things might be published, or not. One of these things might sell nicely, or it won't. If I keep on waiting for "the one" that is going to land a movie contract or become a best-seller or whatever, I'll be frozen in fear. If I keep on waiting for that moment when I can sigh and say "yes, I'm not a total failure as a writer." I might need to grown that internally instead of longing for it externally. I have lost the exact words I want for this. I thin we know what this feels like - we desperately want someone to come along behind us and say "yes." to us. I'm kind of terrified that it I don't pick the right project to work on then I won't get that "yes" from the world that I want. So I'm trying to remind myself that over the course of my lifetime there is plenty of time to write, to write books that don't get published or that don't sell much. It's okay.

the lie of importance
This is a sister to the lie of scarcity - and this is the idea that whatever I write needs to be important. It needs to matter. Yeah, so I think I have got this out of my system at least most of the way. I used to be so hung up on everything I considered as a possible writing project had to be a Big Important Work of art or spirituality. Recently though I have read books that weren't Big or Important they were just middling works but they were helpful. Or I've read novels that were pure cotton candy for my brain and they were delightful. It's okay to be small and simple. Sometimes that's what is needed.

the lie of shame
I have been shaming myself about my lack of writing and I don't think I had even realized it - I was playing the loop about "how can you call yourself a writer when the only writing you do is a few words on Instagram. That's not what a real writer does. You are a fraud." and usually this is followed up with "You're going to fail. You'll never be good enough. You can't hack it." Or something like that. But my eyes are opening to how destructive a force this is. Shame is not our friend. Shame weighs us down. I was never once motivated to do something good by shame. Gentleness looks at a disaster of a day and "counts the wins" (as one of my favorite authors likes to say). Gentleness puts on the tea kettle and tucks me into bed and says "tomorrow you can try again". I can not say it enough how hard the last year and a half of homeschooling Josiah plus all of Grayson's medical drama. Writing has kind of fallen to the wayside. But other things deep inside of me have been growing. I get to a peek of them every once in awhile. Those deep things are the important things, and they'll get their day in the sun sooner or later.

I think that's all of the things I wanted to share tonight. It's super late so I'm going to bed. If you have something you'd like to share about this please send me a message via social media or leave a comment! This whole writing thing is hard. We could all use all of the encouragement we can get.

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