What the hell am I doing?
Ask yourself this all day
It’s my hope that today’s writing adventure is cathartic.
Set a timer; you’ll need at least 5 minutes, but try to give yourself more time if you can. The more time the better with this exercise.
At the top of a page, write “what the hell am I doing?” and initiate something like a written conversation with yourself to check in with things you’re working on, stuff happening in your life, stuff you’re dreaming about but that feels out of reach. Let it all out. Write until you feel like you’ve listed it all and also have unpacked a bit around how you’ve been approaching it and how you might need to shift or reinforce or double down or simply stay the course.
It might become a tough love sesh, in which the answer to "what the hell am I doing?” might be “fooling myself about it being hard to break through when in fact I’m barely submitting any work to editors” or maybe the answer opens up a pep talk and the answer is “I’m doing my best and am slowly but surely making progress but oh how I wish I had more support”…. it’ll come. Let it and capture it all.
I’ve stressed before the importance of writing without stopping and I encourage that approach here with this, too. Here’s why it matters: the minute you pause to rework a sentence or fix a typo or think of the next thing to say, you’re not writing; you’re editing. And that is not only a vastly different brain-part, but it’s self-censorship and that’s the literal opposite of what we’re doing with this. Capture it all, the full river of thought; not just the carefully edited raft floating along in its waters. Let’s go.
