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I was going to post this, but then I remembered "lessons I learned from therapy and also nice/insightful people on here" and I thought twice. This is what I was going to post:
"I am so bad at actually writing stuff, it's just beyond me how I still have a job."
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"I am so bad at actually writing stuff, it's just beyond me how I still have a job."
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Now this might seem funny or typical twitter self-deprecation (I've published ~50 articles, a few blogs, my h-index is perfectly respectable which means people even read & cite my stuff ...), but it's also true. I have a terribly hard time writing stuff.2/ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=c8Ar3N4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
All of my articles are co-authored, few of them are first-authored by me. I have never been able to get up in the morning and motivate myself to write a whole damn article on my own. My motivation comes purely from guilt from my co-authors. I dip my quill in guilt juice.
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Not that my lovely co-authors put guilt onto me, even if they might despair to my attitude towards deadlines. They simply personify guilt to me. It's how it works, if & when it works at all. Which is honestly a sucky way to get a job done, when it's a main part of my job.
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Anyway, I've been in therapy. So I stopped myself from posting that. I thought twice. I sat myself down and breathed a bit and gave myself a talking-to. The talking-to involved thinking about how much I actually enjoy the flow and work of writing when I'm in it, but ...
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still consider myself insufficient to the task before I can even begin. How I psych myself out with all the articles and reports and proposals and books I should be writing/have written before I can even get started on a single paragraph, or even open the file.
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So I decided to give myself a little gift. I gave myself a bit of breathing space. I made space all around, without any guilt, without any other mental burdens. I allowed myself to look forward to writing and getting done this one particular thing (a part of a short paper).
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I allowed myself to believe that this paper was going to be good, and I was good enough to write it, at this moment. Then I turned off the internet and wrote it. It's going to be awesome. You'll love it. So I think I'm going to try writing guilt-free from now on.
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