How I stopped wasting energy trying to be someone I'm not

Writing these bloglettes is definitely a passion project of mine. I love discovering new ideas, researching, writing about and sharing them. But, since I launched this blog 7 months ago, it’s sometimes been like pulling teeth being consistent about writing and posting these.

If this is something I really love doing, why is it so hard for me to get it done?!

For a while I thought that it should be easy to sit down and artfully pump out these little bloglettes in one sitting. After all, it’s ONLY 350 words and I’m writing about subjects that I love! What could possibly be hard about that?

But this wasn’t happening.

I was constantly missing my deadlines and a cloud of frustration would hang over me. Why can’t I do this? I must be a bad writer. Maybe this project isn’t for me.

But what I’ve come to realize is that my process is not fast and that’s ok. From beginning to end, it takes me at least a week, oftentimes more, to completely finish writing a bloglette. My first draft is usually very disjointed. Then I step away, think about it and come back to it a few times until I finally get the flow and wording exactly right. Over the past few months, I’ve proved this method to be my process EVERY TIME. Whether I like it or not, my process is not fast.

So is this really such a bad thing?

I’ve learned to see the benefits of my process and that I actually enjoy thinking about these subjects over time. It helps sort my thoughts so I can get the best result and I wouldn’t be able to do that if I was fully writing them in one sitting.

Would it be convenient for my process to be a bit faster? Sure! But that’s not me, at least not right now.

It’s exhausting to try and be someone you’re not and I realized that I was wasting energy on a fantasy of who I should be. I was constantly telling myself that I wasn’t good enough instead of honoring and accepting MY process, which history had shown works best for me.

It’s such a relief to not think I need to write more quickly and ironically, this was one of the fastest blog posts I’ve ever written!