February Page Count: Choose to Build Yourself Up
15 pages for February 2022.
Work overtook my life this month. I stepped up to take on a project that otherwise wouldn’t have been able to launch. It was stressful and working twelve-hour days and weekends drained all of my energy and left me feeling burnt out. I don’t say this to make excuses, but rather to help myself keep things in perspective. I could tear myself down and be hard on myself about how I wrote 50% less of my creative projects this month, compared to last. But instead of being ruthless with myself, I’m choosing to build myself up. I made a difference in bringing a new product for my company to market and in the midst of the mayhem, I wrote 15 pages and consistently showed up for my Sunday writing group sessions.
What I’m getting at is that there are times when we need to be critical of ourselves. It’s important to hold ourselves accountable. If we consistently have all the time and energy to sit down to write but still choose to do everything else instead, that’s on us. If writing is something we aspire to do, we can’t keep shouting about all the ideas we have on Twitter or talking about all the edits we need to make with a friend, we have to take action.
And I know that’s hard.
When things don’t go as expected, you have to choose between breaking yourself down or evaluating, regrouping, and moving forward.
Because on the flipside life can (and often does) get in the way and there’s nothing we can do about it. So many things out of our control are happening and to make it to the next day, we have to focus all our attention and energy on that problem, monster, obstacle, whatever. If obstacles that are out of your control keep popping up, don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t get to write as much as you want. Keep rolling with the punches and do what you can when you can. When things don’t go as expected, you have to choose between breaking yourself down or evaluating, regrouping, and moving forward.
So rather than zero in on the fact that I only wrote 15 pages and not 28 (like I had planned), I’m going to take pride in my progress and remind myself that I’m 15 pages closer to finishing my work in progress.
33 + 15 = 48 pages
March, here we come.
