Re-learning How to Show Up for Myself through Writing
I’ve been pondering what it means to show up for myself, which entails a delicate balance of discipline and self-compassion. I’ll use my writing practice as an example. As an academic, a primary measure of productivity is the number of scientific manuscripts published and grant proposals funded. So writing is one of the biggest parts of my job. Writing is something that I love, but I also procrastinate it and dread it at the same time. It takes intention and effort to show up to write.
About ten years ago while in grad school, I developed an early morning writing routine to get me through the long process of dissertation writing. It was incredibly daunting at first, but I found comfort and motivation in books like Write Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker and How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia. The books collectively emphasized the value of even small bits of writing and tracking progress. I discovered the pomodoro technique during this time and made a tracking sheet of how many pomodoros I could get through each morning before heading off to campus. The magic number for me was 4 pomodoros each morning, discovered through trial and error.
This routine lasted me throughout the years as I moved around geographically and climbed the academic ladder. My postdoc fellowship, my first faculty job, and then my current faculty job which also included the pandemic period. It endured through all of these major changes. There were times when I was more or less strict with it, but it was always there as a solid practice. Until it wasn’t. I had slowly but surely lost my morning writing practice over the past couple of years — it was so gradual in the week-by-week change that I hardly noticed it until it was just gone.
In a post-mortem, it would be easy to blame some external factor as the root cause. The job description of an academic is actually quite vague and highly variable. The external signals of success are few and far between. For instance, sometimes it takes years to do the research behind a single scientific paper that undergoes multiple rounds of peer review, or devoting hundreds of hours to writing grants that keep getting almost funded but not quite making the cut. It can get demoralizing, and subconsciously it made me crave small wins that feel good in the moment but don’t matter for long-term success. Gradually, I stopped showing up to my morning writing appointments with myself. Even if it was on the calendar, I found myself procrastinating with admin tasks, since the box-checking nature of them felt productive. Then I stopped scheduling the morning writing appointments altogether. I stopped trusting myself to show up, and attempted to reduce the cognitive dissonance of seeing writing time blocked off on my calendar but then not doing it. I also made up complex excuses that as I progressed in my career, that I personally didn’t need to write as much, that I just needed to direct other people’s writing. My personal writing became very sporadic.
A string of professional disappointments over the past year got me to seriously re-evaluate where I want to go with my career, and how I want to show up beyond a job title. I actually enjoy many parts of my current job, but allowed self-doubt to fester and question my career path. As I sit with some level of clarity on some aspects and uncertainty on other aspects of my career, I am reminded that writing is how I have created scholarly value and brought ideas into light through research. I am reminded that I enjoy writing, because it’s hard and takes effort. With expansive as my 2024 word of the year, I want to write publicly in addition to revamping my scholarly writing. This is showing up for myself again, through the discipline of early morning writing and the self-compassion to sit with the hard feelings that writing brings up.
