It’s 3 a.m. and I finally have a chance to write this post. I’m late. It’s been absolutely weighing on me the past few days. I try to always post on Sundays and Wednesdays and, obviously, I did not this past Sunday. I have a horrible sense of guilt and doom in the pit of my stomach because of it.
I haven’t written the past prompt short story or the two anthology stories I assigned myself last week yet either. I feel a strong sense of failure, like my whole project is doomed, because I am behind. I keep telling myself it was bound to happen, but it disappoints me.
All I can use as an excuse it that last week was so busy and I was sick all weekend literally. I missed everything this past weekend and the thought of writing was beyond me. Yesterday, when I alternately meant to do it, was slammed at work and I rolled right into dinner plans without pausing for breath. I just didn’t have the time or energy to devote to writing anything even though the ideas are in my head for the stories, the characters are clamoring for attention. The blog practically writes itself so that hardly takes effort; it’s like a journal I get to keep and share publicly so I just have to feel something in order to write it.
This project is supposed to be enjoyable for me. For the most part it is. I don’t want to feel like a failure because I’m behind in writing my blog post by two days or because I haven’t written a story in a week. I think about both. I’m the one always preaching that it is as much mental as it is the physical act of writing and I live with all of my ideas in my head constantly.
I think there is another layer to this whole failure feeling. For the longest time, in my early to mid-thirties, I was under the effects of my bipolar disorder. I was depressed. I felt like a failure all the time and It almost killed me. I finally let it all go when I regulated with drugs and got my life pulled together painstakingly (i.e. good job, husband, bills mostly paid, etc.). I let the failure go for a while and just lived.
Now, I’ve once again put all this pressure on myself, about writing, about my job, about my family, my responsibilities (both perceived and real) and everything else. I operate on the cusp of constant failure and it takes so little to feel like I’m tumbling over the edge. If I’m not careful, I will become paralyzed by that fear, if not the actual failure to meet my responsibilities.
Writing is a joy to me. I try to maintain a schedule and practice as often as I can. It does not usually feel like a burden or something I must force myself to do. But, when I attach those familiar failure feelings to the whole enterprise, it becomes something else. I start to resent the obligations. I put so much pressure on myself to keep to the schedule, to meet the duties of writing, that I stop feeling the joy. That is definitely not my intention with this project. I want to explore the happiness writing brings me and in the process create a product that might help other people cope with their lives.
As so many other people do, I suffer from a constant striving for perfection in my life. I live in terror of failure more so than anything else. That sense of failure, that feeling, has been the companion of so many of the worst moments of my life. If I tangle up my writing project with that feeling, it will lose all of its purpose and spontaneity and meaning. I need to learn, once again, to just let some of it go and live. I don’t understand why that one lesson is so hard for me to learn, but it seems I come at it again and again from different perspectives and struggle to learn to not be perfect, to embrace failure as a part of the learning process of life.
So, maybe this whole train of thought is one big excuse for not being more dedicated to my writing and prioritizing it. Or maybe I’m on the right track in just letting it all go. I apologize to my readers for being behind in my blog posts. I apologize to myself for being tired, distracted and lacking the energy this past week to compose new stories. I will start fresh from here and accomplish more this week and let the feeling of failure go.
At least, I will try to. It is doing me no good as it stands. I just feel panicky and tired thinking about writing which absolutely defeats my whole purpose with this project. The failure feeling will eat me alive if I let it. I can feel it nibbling at the edges of one of the most pleasurable and meaningful things I am doing in my life right now: writing. I have to take control of it or it will destroy this joy for me. It has happened to me before with other things.
I’m posting today. It’s the best I could do this past week. I’m actively working to let the failure feeling go. I will not let it destroy this part of my life. I choose to be in control of how I feel and how I respond to my own actions. In fact, I’m learning a valuable lesson. It’s a matter of reframing, right?
For today, I have not failed. My project has not failed because I wrote my blog post two days late. My writing is not a failure because I haven’t been able to finish a story in a week. I’ve simply taken a small break, a needed respite from creating. It’s okay. I’m okay. Failure feeling…be banished!
daisybelle1313 