This is my fourth attempt at writing a newsletter today. After spending twenty or thirty minutes on three separate topics, I got annoyed and switched gears. I wasn’t annoyed at any of the topics; they’re all topics I want to write about, but I just wasn’t “feeling” any of those particular topics today. In fact, I wasn’t feeling any topic today.
Today is one of those days where I feel restless and out-of-control and can’t handle working on something for more than half an hour before needing to move on to something else (a microcosm of my multipotentialite life).
I used to protect my autonomy so much that I would never work on creative things unless I felt like it. While I still think that’s how it should be, I have learned that I do need structure and constraints and deadlines. There are times when I think it is better to force things, but there are times when I think it’s better not to. I wish there was a hard and fast rule about how to discern which is which, but in my experience it’s something that just takes a lot of trial and error and self-awareness.
I think part of my problem with whether I’m “feeling” a topic or not is that I want to create a newsletter that is meaningful, and only talk about things that are worth saying. This is a great aim to have, but I’m still in the very early stages of writing (and in many ways, life!). If I’m only ever writing once a week for this newsletter, then I’m essentially treating it like all my at-bats have to be home runs, which is something that isn’t feasible even for a highly-skilled expert. I need to be more mindful of the gap between my expectations and my skills and life experience, and know that I’m not going to have something new and exciting and spectacularly impactful to say each week. The reality is that if I’m only writing once a week, a lot of what I write in the early stages might not be meaningful at all.
But that’s okay. It’s part of any creative process. And part of the purpose for this newsletter was also to simply document my journey. I think the mundane realities of life and the creative process need to be shared more often. Most of what we see online is highly curated and therefore seems impossibly unattainable. The idea of overnight success is there because we rarely see the early, struggling stages, or the bad days that everyone experiences, or the days that are simply uninspired or uneventful. Everyday things can also be just as powerful to talk about, if not more so, and I hope that I can find a good balance between sharing the meaningful and the mundane.
I don’t really know how to wrap this up, other than to say that this was my reality today. It may be helpful for you to read, or it may not. Either way, I appreciate your time here as I do my best to navigate this journey.
Thanks very much for following along.