A Complete and Thorough Explanation of Why I Haven't Written

I haven’t published much in the past few months. Over the weeks, I’ve had numerous reasons why I’ve been unable to sit down and write. A few months ago, it was because I had just discovered that socializing and being a person in society is good actually, and I was catching up on basically a year of not hanging out with people. A few weeks ago, it was because I was freaking out over a regulatory exam, and I needed to pass because my life depended on it. Now, given that I passed the exam, and have become sufficiently nourished on the social interaction front, I have no excuses left to give.

All I can offer is the truth: writing isn’t very fun for me right now.

My ambitions greatly dwarf my capabilities, and I have delusion of the literary grandeur I can achieve while holding a full-time job, and then I get disappointed with myself and give up completely. I have extremely high expectations for myself, and I know that I can produce excellent content, so I berate myself when my writing isn’t incredible. If it’s not top-notch, it’s not worth publishing, and my writing currently isn’t top-notch because I’ve been unwilling to suffer until I reach perfection these days, so therefore I am an unprolific little rat.

I’m not just an unprolific little rat. I’m also an unknown little rat, which is way worse! If I were a famous YouTube star with a million followers who happened to take a hiatus, I might get some hate mail for not making more content, but I’d also get tons of gushing fan mail and support, which might motivate me to return to the craft. Me? I still have to lift myself up by the bootstraps.

So my grand ambitions paralyze me, and I’m too low status to get to be motivated for “the fans”. Those are all reasons that I haven’t been writing. But the truest answer I can give doesn’t have to do with status.

Writing from the heart is very lonely. Even though I feel incredibly lucky about my craft (I have really thoughtful readers and very supportive friends who help edit), writing on the side also feels like having a second mountain to scale after I’ve trekked a whole day of work.

I don’t have any robust solutions here regarding this second climb at the end of the day. I’m not a lean mean grinding machine. I can’t just stomach through pain and pretend to you that writing is a molehill and not a mountain.

But I do have a seed to plant for myself and maybe for you too. I don’t know when I’ll be writing intensely every week, but in some weird way, I think that the seed will likely take fruit.

Sometimes I remember the feeling I get at the top of the climb — the solo view I have of all the world beneath me — and that motivates me to continue another climb. I struggle to consistently remember it, but when I do, that makes all the costs of caring worth it.