I’m on holiday right now, which is great. But this also means that my usual routine has been completely uprooted, which has really affected my writing. In fact, in the entirety of last week, I only managed to get one writing session in…
In a way I’m proud of myself for having made the time to write at all, but I had really wanted to do better than what I did, so I’m a little disappointed in myself.
The good news is that I’m only half way through my holiday, meaning that I can learn from my mistakes and I still have a full week to do better.
I have to admit though, that today was not the best start for doing better.
The hardest part about not having written for a whole week is that I lost the momentum I had from writing every day, and now I have to “start” again. As you might have caught on by now, starting is genuinely something I struggle with sometimes.
In fact, I struggle with it so much when it comes to writing that I almost didn’t write at all today, which led me to begin to beat myself up about it, and my mind started flooding me with the knowledge that I was falling back into a loop of not writing. The last time this happened, several months passed before I actually wrote again… and if that happened again now, not only would I not be upholding the promise I made to myself, but also, with every passing day without writing it would become harder for me to get back into my story, increasing the risk of me giving up and maybe starting all over again. And that would be devastating, especially after all the progress I’ve made so far.
The crazy thing is that, even though I knew this and that I’ve been repeating to myself all day that I couldn’t let this happen, I wasn’t able to make myself make time for writing. I kept pushing it back and prioritizing other tasks over it – I guess this is the strange workings of the mind, and I’m sure there must be a term that describes and explains exactly what I was going through and why I kept procrastinating the thing I absolutely wanted to do.
I did eventually get to writing (at 10:30 PM) and I completely owe that to my boyfriend for having – with love – pushed me off my butt and told me to go work on my novel instead of dwelling on how hard it felt to get started.
At first my writing was messy and it didn’t fit in anywhere in my already existing chapters, but I didn’t allow that to stop me. Instead, I told myself to write messily, even if it made no sense. I kept reminding myself that today’s success was simply the fact that I was writing at all, and that thereby I was breaking the “non-writing loop”. By doing this I was also able to fight off the negative and destructive beliefs that had gradually begun to fill my head.
Even though this evening I wasn’t convinced that any of my writing made sense for my novel, about twenty minutes into the writing session, I actually really enjoyed myself and I remembered how much I love writing.
I guess that sometimes I just need a little push, and I’m so grateful that my boyfriend provided it to me today when I wasn’t strong enough to do it myself.
Now I’m going to go to sleep because it’s actually really late already (almost midnight), but I will do so with a smile on my face thanks to the knowledge that I wrote today, and with excitement in my soul due to the anticipation of writing more tomorrow.