Back in the Habit
What is this blog even about?
I kept asking myself this as I tried for about a month to start a blog post, something suitably appropriate, for what I thought would become the masthead for where I would keep my writing work going forward.
And then I did nothing.
More than that I realised I couldn’t do anything. I’ve known I’ve been suffering from burnout for a while; ever since ‘the incident’. Ideas don’t flow as easily and when I do have them I’m more distracted. I used to push through this feeling and write anyway; anything at all, 500 words every week day. It was rarely good, but it was something. Now I can’t manage even that.
So I considered quitting.
Plenty of people live their lives every day without the gnawing worm of writing eating through their skull. Without the desperate need for the attention and validation of the people around them and the pitiless fear of rejection, or worse, complete indifference. I don’t have to do this to myself. You’re not proving anything by holding your hand to a hot stove. I could stop any time I wanted.
But would it make me happy?
The fact that I’ve written this probably tells you my answer. Even though it hurts right now, writing is one of the few things that genuinely makes me happy. It is a conversation with myself that increasingly I feel I need to order my thoughts. It takes the jumble of things inside my head and lets me lay them out so that I understand them better.
So what is this blog even about?
It’s about me, my writing and my relationship to it. It’s a place to be a sounding board for my thoughts on stories, world building and design. But more than anything it’s a place for me to put my work as I try to fall back in love with writing again.
I don’t know how this journey will go, but I hope you’ll come along on it with me.