Routine

Every Saturday for the past couple of months I’ve sat down for a few hours and written a blog post so it can get edited and published by the end of the weekend.

Before I started doing this, I wrote when I was inspired and had energy. And I think I needed that for a time. I have a strong history of perfectionism, so creating a routine often involved a lot of self-shaming to keep it going and guilt when I broke the cycle. Giving myself permission to write without sticking to a schedule helped me to separate my self-worth from whether I had a perfect attendance record for “butt-in-chair.”

Then something shifted. The thing I wanted more than anything was to write more, and yet I wasn’t showing up consistently to do so. I was scared that if I created a routine, I wouldn’t be able to keep myself on track without the shame, and even then it would eventually all fall through. But, if I didn’t create a container for my writing, I was going to continue to make very slow progress or no progress at all toward my goal.

I was going to have to trust myself if I wanted to take the next step forward toward my goal.

So I created a sacred container to write every Saturday and see what happened. And it was going pretty well until this weekend.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing pops and cracks in the walls. I tried to convince myself it was just expansion and contraction of the walls, but Reddit said it was potentially an electrical issue. Given that my light was flickering every 10-20 minutes and one of the outlets in my room had sparked the first week we moved in, it felt like one of the few times to actually believe random people on the internet.

I finally worked up the nerve to ask for an electrician to be brought in, and he discovered that indeed, some of the electrical had been poorly hooked up by a previous electrician. He redid the outlets in my room, but I was paranoid at that point. My sister ordered a voltage monitor to help my anxiety and we waited for it to arrive.

By the time Saturday rolled around, my mind was on edge. Every time I sat down to write, I had another excuse to do something else. I wanted to go to brunch. There were some spices I had been meaning to buy. Once I ordered those, I wanted to look at and print the recipes they have on their website so I actually used them. Then the voltage monitor arrived and I tested every outlet in the house (two open neutrals plus one potentially iffy outlet—more paranoia for me).

Now, none of these things was wrong or bad. In fact, they were all great. But they encroached on the time I’d set aside to show up for myself and my craft. And by early evening, I decided I just couldn’t and gave up.

So here was the test. Would I beat myself up for not getting my writing done? Would I give myself grace after a tough week and fight the inner critic telling me it would happen again? Would I push myself to write on Sunday instead in the hopes that I could push it out by Sunday night so no one would notice?

Then something surprised me. What came to my head was: What’s going to get me closer to my goal?

Let’s back up a step. My friend Lauren Marie Fleming teaches in her Write Your Friggin’ Book Already program that knowing your why is the most crucial part of writing because it’s what’s going to get you through the rough times. But I think it’s actually a little more than that.

We’re trained in extremes in our society. Stay on track no matter what. If you don’t stay on track, punish yourself to get on track or fall completely off the rails. Everything is framed through scarcity. In this case, if you waste any time at all, then you’ve failed.

My behavior in the past has always mirrored this. I’m either in full, rigid compliance mode with whatever promise I’ve made to myself or I falter a few times and I just stop taking it seriously because clearly it doesn’t mean enough to me to keep myself on track.

But my why for writing is because it brings me immense joy. Writing from a place of scarcity sucks the joy right out of it. Judging myself weighs me down until I don’t want to write anymore. It’s only by accepting that whatever happened yesterday is over and the only thing I can control is what happens today that I can continue writing from that place of joy.

So what was going to get me closer to my goal of writing more and keeping writing a joyful practice?

Waiting until the following weekend didn’t feel great. I write because I get to, and so if I could fit it in sooner I wanted to try. That also felt like a good compromise of giving myself a break when I needed it but also getting back on the horse asap.

Squeezing my writing all in on Sunday also didn’t feel great. We were going to be downtown most of Sunday watching a musical. I didn’t want to write from a place of urgency and scarcity. Writing is sacred to me, and I don’t want to push something out that isn’t ready for the sake of meeting a self-imposed schedule.

But starting on Sunday and publishing on Monday or Tuesday… That felt right.

So here I am on Monday night finishing off my edits for the weekend’s post. I’m not perfectly on schedule, but I’m still getting my writing done. And in the end, that is what matters toward meeting my goal. I can feel good about that and feel proud that I’ve taken another step on my journey toward a more aligned and healthier life.