Begone, Sword of Guilt! I have conquered the art of restarting a project. I have done the thing, restarted the blog. I HAVE BEATEN YOU. (For now. Please don’t come back to me with a vengeance trying to prove me wrong. K, thanks, bye.) 

I can’t even tell you how good this feels. For the past two years, I have wanted to write this blog. Catch up with myself and write forward. For the past two years, I have lived my life with guilt eating at me for not accomplishing that for various reasons, and on the flip side, with thinking that various experiences would make great blog posts and writing them in my head. It’s been torture. 

It’s always difficult to restart any project because it’s much more of a mental game than a physical one. You need to prepare yourself to get back in the game, and that journey can be fraught with fear, imposter syndrome (not feeling good enough), resistance, and any number of other challenges that prevent you from just doing the thing.

It’s annoying.

It’s also life.

Which is why it’s so important to keep going once you DO start (or restart) a major project, because stopping and starting again will become so much harder—and you deserve better than to have to deal with that struggle time and again. We all do. We need to live the lives we are meant to live and share our gifts with the world. That’s not possible if we give into the negative sides of creating art. 

How did I face my demons and start doing the thing I was fearing? 

One, I changed my course of action. I had been trying to fill in all the blanks of the past, but I didn’t stay up to date with the present for that to be successful. I kept falling further and further behind. It was a vicious cycle.

Two, I found a  deadline that worked for me. I’m not great at self-imposed deadlines; they feel too fake for me. NaNoWriMo is the one thing that works great for me, but, unfortunately, it’s only one month out of the year. Camp NaNoWriMo, a relaxed version of the event, happens 2 months per year, but you set your own word count goal, and there isn’t much community activity. This makes it feel less “real” to me than primary NaNo. Over the past several Camps, my project was going to be reinstating my blog. Never quite got around to accomplishing that.

Thankfully, this year, my resurgence in writing and my blog coincided beautifully with NaNo. I do need to find other structures that work just as well for me going forward, but for the moment I’m finding great success.

Three, I faced my fear and just did it. This sounds contrite, like it doesn’t take too much effort to do this, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It was HARD facing this thing that has basically been a failure for me so far. No one likes to fail. And a lot of people tend to move on and try to forget their moment of failure, but this one I couldn’t. I knew I needed to get back to blogging, as a writer and would-be (published) author. What’s more, I wanted to get back to blogging. I wanted to write about my life and share my experiences; I wanted to talk about the things that get me excited: books and stories and well-crafted sentences.

So, one day, I took that first step. And then I took another step, and then another. It was just that easy, and just that hard. 

But I did it. I conquered my fear and faced my failure. And so can you.