On letting go of the post I thought I *should* write.
I was all set to write about my 2018 trip to Burma this week.
It’s a topic that means a lot to me — layered and personal and emotional and culturally significant. My dad grew up there. I went with him. It was the first and last trip we took together as adults. There’s so much I want to say.
But I couldn’t figure out the narrative, the thread, the shape, the entry point, the… words. My brain feels like a pan of scrambled eggs. I procrastinated for a week, and here I am on Monday evening, still stuck. It’s just not happening right now.
Every time I sat down to write, I felt blocked. Not just a “staring into the abyss of a blank page” kind of stuck, but a heavier resistance. The kind that made me question why I was forcing it.
I don’t want to write because I have to. So I asked myself:
- Why am I pushing myself to write right now? (Because I told myself I’d stick to a weekly schedule.)
- Who am I writing this for? (It should be… me, no?)
- Why am I being so hard on myself about sticking to this exact topic, this exact week? (This week marks six years without him, which felt timely and important.)
- Am I trying to prove something, and if so, to whom? (Maybe? But I have nothing to prove to anyone. Surely not on Substack where people can read my writing for free.)
- Am I confusing consistency with rigidity? (Probably.)
That line of questioning gave me clarity:
- I don’t have to write something meaningful just because I planned to.
- I don’t have to dig deep on a topic just because I told myself I would.
- I don’t owe anyone anything.
- What I owe, at most, is honesty with myself.
And the truth is, I’m just not feeling it this week. I don’t have the words this week. For anything, and definitely not for a long-form post about a heartfelt topic.
It feels so meta to write a bunch of words about not having the words, but I guess that’s what this week’s post is about. It’s ok to put things on the shelf for later. It’s ok to pivot. It’s ok to create from where you are, not from where you think you should be.
And where I am today is tired. Not everything has to be on a schedule or deadline.
That’s it. That’s the post.
P.S. – I really hate that every time I use an em dash (and I actually use an en dash because it’s shorter, and therefore, I use it incorrectly, and idc, y’all get the point), I second-guess it because everyone will think it’s AI. I overcompensate by keeping all my run-on sentences to prove I’m not a robot, but a rambling human.
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