failure

I’ve been hard on myself my entire life.

It took a lot to finally admit to myself that I was hard on myself.  Me.  Not my parents, not society, but me.  I wanted to succeed, and therefore, I was certain I needed never to fail.

But we learn more from failure than we do success.  Fact.  And I’ve learned more from my failures than I have my successes.  Definite fact.  However, I so often feel like a failure that I need to remind myself to support my inner moppet.

Even then, in that moment, I deflected.  I pushed it away from myself into joke territory as a way to lessen the blow.  But I write this because my goal for spring break, to write 35,000 words of Marvel among the Demons, has failed.

And that’s okay.

Why is it okay?  Because, as my friend Sunny reminds me time and time again, I’m only on my schedule with my writing.  Further, I was recovering from my oral surgery.  But mostly, because I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing a little bit every day, and it’s hard, very very hard, to get back into the habit once you’ve kicked it.

So tomorrow, I begin writing again, just a little bit, just enough to kickstart me back into daily writing life.  I miss writing, the way I miss stars, or chocolate, or rain.  The ache I feel when I don’t write, like something’s missing in my life.  These are moments I need, to be me, to feel what I want to feel.

Writing is my life, you understand.  In all of its different incarnations–fiction, blogging, non-fiction, academic–this is what I do.

This is what I do.

Advertisement