For a good part of yesterday I beat myself up about not writing. My goal for this January has been to write every weekday that the kids are in school, I even managed a post on one holiday, but the streak died yesterday.

I have a very defeatist attitude about not reaching a goal sometimes. For example, a teeny, tiny voice was telling me to just give it up altogether yesterday because I did not blog. Obviously, that voice lost out, but it’s one that I am very familiar with. I’ve heard it many times before when I have abandoned blogging or journaling and I’m human, so of course the voice won on more than one occasion.

Hand in hand with that struggle is my ability to forgive myself. Traditionally, I have been horrible at this! But, as I close in on the ripe old age of 43, I’m getting better at forgiving myself, allowing grace to be in parts of my day and in my head with much more consistency than before. When I slow down enough, when I stop catastrophizing, grace stabilizes me, lifts my spirits, and even gives me hope.

You can see where this is going. After a very strong start to this blog, there were some gaps in writing. Sometimes just a few days, but then months, and even years between posts. I think that entire time I was engaged in negative self talk about not writing, or about my writing itself. It was a relentless voice and it not only criticized my writing (or lack thereof), but my parenting, my running ability, my husbanding. 

That voice paired with depression, which reared its scary, ugly head in early 2017, was a double whammy to my motivation to write. Instead of writing, I ran more, I consumed more shows, movies, and podcasts. To be clear, these are not bad things, but nearly every time I was watching, running, or listening I thought, well, I could be writing.

I thought the new goal was surviving. One child with ASD and ADHD, another having just arrived, plus every thing else a stay at home parent does, I did not see a way I could maintain a habit of writing. But survival started to feel like stagnation. I stagnated for a long time. There were flickers of activity, but no consistency. No habit. A behavior can’t change you until it’s a habit.

In November of last year I started to think about writing again, but with consistency. Internal debates carried out in my mind. What does consistency look like? What will you do if you miss a day? How many posts a week are we talking here? Once a day? Twice a day? Seven days a week? Allowing myself grace, thank God, I settled on five posts a week, unless kids are not in school. If I manage a post while they are home, then great, but with a moderate dose of realism, and again grace, if I don’t write on a day I am soloing them about town that’s completely fine.

Yesterday was another test of that grace. It was a struggle for a bit, but this time I knew I’d be right back in this seat in the morning. All this time I’ve put writing on the back burner to survive, to get by. What was really happening was that some big part of me just started to be taken over by everything else this life throws at you. I guess in November I just had this realization that if I wanted to save that part of me, that dream, my voice, I would have to share it. I would have to create again. I am once again excited to.

*Just wanted to share that one of my favorite movies of the year is Train Dreams on Netflix and since starting this writing thing again I have listened to its beautiful and haunting soundtrack a lot, but no more than the titular song “Train Dreams” by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner. Have a listen here and then watch the movie if you have not.