Jeremy C Kester

It seems that lately, though my Muse has been tickling my ear, my motivation to write has been absent. Where it went, who knows? Maybe it is out getting a few drinks. Maybe it has gone to find coffee to wake its ass up. Or perhaps it was taken hostage by that nefarious entity Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance”. In either case, the bigger problem hasn’t been whether or not Motivation is around me, it’s that I have refused to look for it.

Since writing that blog a week ago where I decided to “give up” on this whole dream of becoming a full-time, self-sustaining writer, Motivation walked out on me and I stayed in the house pretending that I didn’t care. Yet I do care. I’ve been just too stubborn to allow myself to accept that.

The entire point of the exercise in writing that post was to come to terms with the fact that I likely will never get to a point where the act of writing (and all those things that come along with it) becomes my primary career. What it wasn’t was a treatise on my deciding that I will never write or that I would not put any effort into making writing a career. Yet, I treated it as such. Resistance got its victory as once I watched Motivation leave. Only now do I realize how I let myself be deceived by me. (Admittedly, it is quite easy to trick myself into or out of many things…) Funny; I hadn’t realized how I allowed the dream of becoming a full-time writer get tangled and intertwined with the motivation to write itself. While I thought it was some separate thing causing me problems, I come to find it wasn’t.

Until now, I’ve been trying to convince myself that I simply needed a little time away from writing — that it was a natural need for a break. Nope. It was that nefarious Resistance. It tricked me. What was meant to be my letting go of the anxiety of all things sales and marketing and chasing the dream in order to focus on the joy of the art turned into an excuse to throw in the towel on the whole endeavor of writing itself. Since then, I’ve struggled to get anything down on the page and ran from the act like a cat runs from a bath. It is not the case; I need to write.

Coming to this realization that I let myself add extra meaning to that blog that wasn’t there hasn’t been easy. Nor is it nice to know that even if I accept never making it as a financially self-sustaining writer, my stress and anxiety about writing will not abate. I guess this is going to be a continual slog where I have to battle Resistance and spend time worrying if I am doing enough to entice both Motivation and Muse to stay. And while my Muse has never been one to walk away, if Motivation isn’t seated next to me to help me get my words down, eventually the Muse will walk away and I’ll have a bigger problem on my hands.