Eye-to-Eye With Guilt
On patience, presence, and letting reflection find me when it’s ready.
Lately, every time I sit down to write, my mind goes blank and my gut goes tense. As if the words I haven’t written yet are already judging me.
Part of me just shrugs it off.
The other part, though, is eyeball-to-eyeball with Guilt. She’s tapping her foot like a disappointed editor and she keeps whispering, “They’re waiting. You owe them something.”
Ah, right. My audience. It’s no longer just me, writing for the sake of writing. There are people here expecting reflection because that’s what I do on this platform.
If you missed last week’s article, Why I Keep Getting Burned by my Own Excitement, it’s a short muse about the little monster called ‘expectations.’
And I want to put that idea into practice here, because it feels like Life is asking me, “Will you still honor your truth even though silence feels like failure?”
I admit: It feels like failure.
I also admit: I am going to honor my truth.
I’m not going to force words that don’t resonate with me just so you have something to read this week. My ego isn’t so big as to think the world collapses if I go quiet for a week. Or even a couple of months.
So, in one fell swoop, I’m releasing my skewed perception of reader expectations, and the self-inflicted guilt that comes from them.
That doesn’t mean you, my dear readers, don’t matter. You matter. More than you know.
But the original purpose of my writing here is to make sense of my own experiences, and maybe along the way, help you make sense of yours.
There’s no growth in forcing words around pretend events or ideas that don’t resonate. There’s no learning in pretending.
So, I’ll lean into the part of me that trusts ideas will arrive when they’re ready. My writing may become sporadic, but that’s the point: when it comes, it will be the most honest reflection I can offer.
And if I go quiet for a while, know this. I’m living what I’ll eventually write about; not forcing what I don’t feel.
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Most of the time,for me, the story comes in the space when I am not writing, but rather just percolating, waiting for the perfect moment when my writing is ready to arrive and be seen. So wait and trust that it will be there. And it’s never let me down. But I don’t give it expectations or parameters. It doesn’t like those. And honestly the timelines i put on myself are the most challenging as it feeds into my perfectionism, which is the opposite of what I want to feel. Because creation is truly feminine , which means not pushing but rather surrender, allow…flow. Which may mean writing less, but creating more writing that fulfills you and makes you happy. Happy allowing, Lisa!💕
Thank you for naming this so honestly, Lisa 🩷 It gives the rest of us permission to breathe and trust that our words will come when they’re ready. I had to step away from Substackfor a couple of months over the summer, and there were weeks this past year where I couldn’t write a single word — so I opened my dashboard and wrote exactly that. Sometimes we just need that pause to settle before we can return.