If any of you have been following my journey here on Odyssey and paying attention to the articles that I share each week, you may have noticed that last week I didn’t post anything. In my very first article, I shared that I have been writing every day this year. Well, for some reason, these past two weeks I have not been able to bring myself to write anything.
I could throw out excuses, saying I was just too busy to write for the past couple weeks. But I wasn’t really that busy. And even if I was insanely busy the whole time, I still would have made time to write if it was a high enough priority.
I let it slide a couple days, telling myself that I would make up for it. Those days kept spiraling and I got so far behind that it didn’t make any sense to me to try to make those days up.
A lot of times in life I am a very “all or nothing” kind of person. When I start things, I am very full of determination and I will do what it takes to get it done. But sometimes life just happens and I mess up and I get behind, which starts that spiraling pattern. I get so discouraged and it makes me want to give it all up. It’s ridiculous, I know, but a lot of times that’s just how I operate. This time I got to the point of thinking about taking the whole month of July off. I would still follow through on my New Year’s resolution to write every day to the best of my ability, I would just be missing a month in the middle.
But as I was thinking about it, I realized how ridiculous that was. Just because I had missed two weeks didn’t mean that I had to stop all together. There was no reason that I couldn’t pick up where I left off. If writing was really a passion of mine, I knew that I couldn’t just let it fall by the wayside.
I couldn’t allow myself to keep saying “I’ll do it tomorrow” every single day. Falling into a state of complacency is not how I want to live my life. And if I’m being honest, that’s basically how I was living these past two weeks.
I’d like to just call it writer’s block. That was part of it. But I’ve experienced writer’s block before, and this didn’t match what writer’s block feels like. Sure, I sat there and thought about what to write about so many times. But I never took out a piece of paper and a pencil or opened a Word document on my computer. In that time, I never made any kind of effort to try to get back on track. In fact, I am having a hard time writing this article. I had to force myself to sit down and write something because I knew that I would feel better if I did.
It’s still not easy. Something’s still off, and I still don’t feel like writing all that much. But noticing that I’m slipping into complacency is a good first step that can only help me to get back on the path to where I want to be.
