I’ve Been Terrible To You, and I’m Sorry

Carly Mae
Carly Mae
Sep 3, 2018 · 7 min read
Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

I recently had this fantastic idea! One of those ideas that changed my whole agenda… One of those plans that then shaped and alternated all of my decisions moving forward…

I made the decision to challenge myself!

Challenges are great! They push you out of your comfort zone and encourage you to do more of something — or to do more of something new.

That’s good, right…?

They can be good, if structured and thought-through properly.

Hear me out.

So, I thought I had this great idea. It turns out it really wasn’t that smart of a move.

I completely screwed up. And I’m sorry you had to witness it! The good news is, I learned something from it — something I desperately want to share.

I had the thought to challenge myself to write every day for thirty days. I wanted to give myself a 30-day writing challenge — encouraging myself to write every day was initially a beautiful thing. It was wonderful that I was so motivated! For most of this month I did write every single day.

Except right around the 19th-20th I lost steam and momentum, and I didn’t write for several days in a row. I spent the next days (not writing) thinking about why I had stopped. Initially I started talking down to myself, telling myself that it’s wasn’t that hard to write every day — that it was silly I couldn’t keep it up.

Then, after spending some serious time thinking about the real reason why I stopped I realized a few things.

There was a specific reason I had n’t moved forward with the challenge— there was a particular reason my brain hit a wall.

My mind did this to me on purpose! It was trying to tell me something!

The reason I stopped writing was because I didn’t enjoy it anymore… What had initially started out as something good for me, turned out to go against everything that I had hoped would come out of it! I went into this challenge not focusing on submitting to publications, working on improving my writing, practicing my craft, and setting a goal to write more regularly.

Here’s where the challenge went wrong:

I began to write really sh**** rushed pieces.

I didn’t care anymore about my quality of writing, I just cared about publishing something for that day. I wrote about anything and everything, really the first thing that popped into my head. I didn’t care too much about tags or whether the topic was in my wheelhouse.

I just wrote.

At first it was freeing, but then that freedom turned into something else…

Over the duration of the month my pieces became sloppy! I put less time into editing because I cared more about pressing the ‘publish’ button than going through and making sure my edits were thorough.

Not only that, but my language faltered… I stopped using the colorful language I truly believe I embody! In my rush, I stopped actually writing with my voice.

Which was why, I believe, it started to not feel like me anymore that was doing the writing. It was almost like an outer-body experience. I was hovering just a few feet away from myself, watching the keystrokes but reading over my own shoulder asking myself, “What the hell are you doing?”

Yes, it sounded alright. But that was it, it was just alright

Here was a piece I put a lot of time and effort into before this month:

Now here’s a piece I did this month:

Don’t get me wrong.

Both are solid posts.

But one obviously has more effort between the white space. Length aside, the second article is just blabble of my current life — it was me trying to fill the empty space and fulfill my daily requirement. The first was written with the intent to inform and support my actual audience, to do what I always seek to do in my writing and that’s to help fellow writers.

Looking at the stats on both, it was interesting to me that the second (sloppier) post got more views. Really, to me it didn’t matter. All that mattered to me personally, is that I’m writing with intent and purpose. Stats aside.

In high school, my choir teacher used to tell her students that it shouldn’t be ‘practice makes perfect’. She said this because you could be practicing wrong, thus setting yourself back farther into your progress. She said instead to aim for the thought that:

“Perfect practice makes perfect.”

She went on to tell us in an ideal world everything would be perfect, but nothing ever truly is. So aiming to be better than before is a solid definition of ‘perfect practice’. Moving forward, this will be in the back of my brain as I write.

Because sloppy and rushed just does nothing for anyone.

I ended up not really going into depth like I wanted to.

I became hyper focused on the goal to just write that I started completely diluting my vision on what I should have or even wanted to write about. I cut myself short, missed important details, lacked true depth and classy execution. It was just a hodge-podge of words on a page that made sense but had no clear structure (because it was resembling my rushed thoughts as they entered my brain and I word vomited them onto the page).

Let me say that I believe it is my duty to be writing great pieces for you, for my audience. It’s my job to be writing the best possible articles that I can!

Otherwise, why am I doing this?!

I became quickly burnt out in this challenge, I started getting tired of writing every day thus I stopped writing the details that makes my writing come to life. I stopped talking about my experiences, I stopped sharing, I stopped interacting beyond just instructing… I was no longer helping.

I pressured myself to do something I enjoyed, turning my passion into a chore.

Because I felt I was under the constant daily deadline, I stopped focusing on what I was writing about and every day I dreaded heading to my computer to try to create something.

THIS SHOULDN’T BE HAPPENING!

Writing is my escape from the real world, it’s what makes everything else in my life tolerable! I need it to stay that way for my own sheer sanity and self-care!

This past mont, writing was no longer something I looked forward to but something I dismissed as a daily chore. I waited until the very end of the day to write when before this challenge it would be the first thing I did in the morning when I got up.

“Okay Carly, it’s time to write. What wisdom are you going to pour upon your audiences today?”

More is not always better. Plain and simple. Especially when it comes to writing and posting quality pieces on Medium. It takes time.

The moral of the story is, that these personal challenges can truly be effective if they are created for the right reasons. I did not create mine for the right reason. My goal was to write every day, so in diving into that challenge I did just that. In a way I was successful because I learned from the experience. But over the course of the month, I forgot about all of the other aspects that make me who I am as a writer.

If you create a challenge for yourself, I plead that you think it all the way through.

Think about who you want to be at the end of it, create effective and achievable improvements that continue to support your larger goal. Why do you do what you do? Why do you write? If your challenge doesn’t help support your growth or assist in answering those questions, maybe you should ask yourself if you should really be doing it.

Don’t just offer yourself a challenge just because. There should be a reason, otherwise you’re wasting your time doing something that you’re getting nothing out of in the end. Because whatever journey you end up going on, don’t forget you’re taking your audience on this journey with you.

So. With that being said, I’m sorry my writing has been rushed. I’m sorry it’s been crappy. I’m sorry I put you through that!

As a side note, this challenge taught me (beyond what I just outlined above) that I don’t NEED to write every day. In all reality, I SHOULDN’T write every day. In order to create works of writing that I am proud of and I feel actually help my overall big-picture goal, I can’t rush the process. If I need to take three days to make something, great! Then so be it!

I encourage you not to feel rushed to create. I would like to add that it’s not wrong by any means to write every day and publish a post. There is NOTHING wrong in that! But don’t ever feel the need to publish that day just because you wrote something the same day. This post (already) has taken me two days to create. And that’s okay.

It’s all about your personal process.

Remember, you are a writer first and foremost! Don’t lose your craft, your passion, and your unique writing talent by rushing through what you think you HAVE to do.

You’re a writer first. Your writing comes first.

Period.


Carly Mae

Written by

Carly Mae

A conversationalist on Creativity, Education, Self-Care, Life Lessons, and Writing. "No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise."

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