Sometimes, life makes it difficult to write.
Maybe you or a loved one has fallen ill, or you’ve had a family emergency. Maybe you’re slogging through a busy period in your professional life (an end-of-quarter push) or your personal life (trying to find your new “normal,” whatever that means, after having a baby). Or maybe you’re feeling worn down by the stresses and pressures of the world at large.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that any one of these challenges would make it hard enough to do the things you have to do, like go to work or buy groceries. To make mental space and calendar space to write on top of it all is even harder. And when multiple instances of stress and busyness compound, it can feel downright impossible.
I’ve been there, too. In fact, I’m just now exiting a period where if I wrote a couple of times a month I considered myself lucky. With that in mind, I wanted to offer a little encouragement and advice that’s worked for me in hopes that, in some small way, it might help you, too.
What to Do When It Feels Hard to Write
Build your capacity for stress, if and as you can.
The best ways I know of doing this are to regulate your nervous system and build vagal tone and to prioritize rest. I like to think of this as building a bigger boat, which can steer me beyond the shallows and into the stormy seas of life.
Minimize your news and social media consumption.
There’s being well-informed, and then there’s working yourself into an insomniac lather over the state of the world and what’s going to happen next. I’ve found that limiting myself to about fifteen minutes of news per day helps me feel strike that balance, and I block out times to take breaks on my phone.
Jealously guard time for yourself.
If you struggle to advocate for alone time, advocate for time to write. I know that for me, this mentally feels like the difference between asking someone to be okay with me lounging around instead of spending time with them and asking someone to be okay with me working toward my goals and doing something creative that lights me up. Even if it’s just for thirty minutes a week, this creative period can be restorative and help you learn how to advocate for your needs further.
Join a generative writing group to body-double for a couple of hours.
Body-doubling is a term popularized in neurodivergent spaces; it describes the way that having another person in a room (virtual or otherwise) with you, doing the same activity, can activate your mirror neurons (check) to help you motivate as well. I recommend Hurley Winkler’s writing workshops and Morning Writing Club, but you can get a similar experience by joining a friend for a writing afternoon at a coffee shop or taking your laptop to a library’s reading room.
Do what you have the capacity for that day or that week.
Assess what that capacity looks like each time you think of sitting down to write. If it looks like nothing, that’s okay. If it looks like tapping some ideas into your favorite notes app while you’re propped against cozy pillows in bed, that’s also okay. There’s no wrong way to get words on paper.
Life can be heavy sometimes, but you can’t beat yourself up about not showing up at the writing desk. In these instances, it’s not a lack of motivation but a lack of resources that’s keeping you from moving forward. If you get mad at yourself for that, it’d be like getting mad at your car for not moving forward if it ran out of gas.
If you need to chat more deeply or one-on-one, I’m here for you, to be a sympathetic ear and a sounding board. You can book a coaching call with me using the button below.
Either way, be kind to yourself, and don’t beat yourself up. Self-flagellation doesn’t yield anything good. You’re doing what you can with what you can, and that’s all that counts.
Happy writing being kind to yourself,
Jessica