August 3, 2022
Week 95
Emotional State: Getting it Going Again
Life, Books, Craft
You may have noticed I didn’t do a weekly journal entry last week. Or maybe you didn’t, which says a thing about a thing I don’t want to think about (it will wake my sleeping imposter syndrome).
I had no energy left last week to write or edit anything personal. Work responsibilities and deadlines took over my life, some of which was self-inflicted (damn you, procrastinating Cass!), and that meant a crunch of hours not spent on my books, my marketing or any of my author work until the weekend.
On top of that, the loom of a deadline approaches – launching Book 2 – and I find myself oddly relaxed about it. I have to keep reminding myself that I have things that must get done to get the book out when I planned to, but I’m not feeling the urgency.
And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
I’ve been working on going with the flow and stopping resistance for a while now in my life. Using meditation and reminders to myself that choice plays a part in everything. I can choose to stop the cycle of stressing about what to do when XYZ happens, because XYZ may not happen as I envision it.
For example, I have a water stain in the ceiling of my office. It appeared one day after a very heavy rain. When the stain first appeared, my reaction was stress. And I of course shared that stress with my world builder, who stresses more than me about these things. (In hindsight, not the best choice I’ve made). Watching his jaw clench and the weight of it hit him made me realize I was choosing tension rather than practicality. Stress instead of solutions.
We don’t have the money to fix our roof right now, but we’ll get it eventually. In the meantime, that leak isn’t going anywhere. If it starts dripping, I’ll get a bucket, a trash bag to protect the floor from splashes, and make sure nothing important is directly underneath it. Will it be the end of us if we use a bucket for a while? No. Will people see us differently because we don’t have $25k for a new roof? Maybe. Is that my problem? No, it’s theirs.
This is where being relaxed and going with the flow works for me. I focus on those things I can do, fix, or address, and stop thinking about all those other things that I’m not going to list because I don’t want to focus on them.
But with my book and its timelines and deadlines, this attitude becomes a problem. Sure, I can launch my book whenever I want, but by pushing it off, I’m stacking up all the other book work I have planned as well, until I won’t want to face it anymore. It’ll be too big to tackle, and I’ll just walk away.
Even though it’s important. Even though it’s part of my long-term goal of being a full-time writer. Even though it goes against what will make me happy.
Burn out is a real thing. And we’ve all been under a weight of heavy external things, plus our daily life stuff, plus any other calamities we’ve faced during the past two years. It’s a real thing even when there isn’t human malware, civil unrest, war, or political chicanery going on that sends people spinning in rage and fear.
And we have to know how to address it. We have to know when stopping to rest is a good thing and when a different tactic should be taken. For me, in this moment, I’ll take a different tactic for $500, Alex. Weekly goals that are achievable to tick off and move that needle will get the machinery in motion again.
It may be slow, it may be creaking, but it’ll be moving and that’s all I really need it to do right now.