An exercise in vulnerability
Motivation is fickle.
Or at least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself.
Every day for the past few weeks, give or take several blurry mornings, I’ve been engaged in a little experiment. I’ve been freewriting.
For 10 minutes each day I sit and write, unfettered by thought or goal or any particular sense of writing towards something. I write for writing’s sake. The reasoning behind this aimless doodling is to improve motivation and codify the very act of writing into my daily routine.
The results have been…mixed. For the first week I did exactly this, writing without conscious thought. If I wrote myself into a corner I repeated the last word over and over until I came upon a continuation. It was refreshing, this idea of not having a particular goal in mind. Any sense of success or failure was banished and words came freely.
After this initial week however I began to grow bored. Motivation is fickle. My writing began to turn in on itself, concerned mostly with my lack of self-confidence or worries of the future. I finished each session not feeling motivated and anxious to write, but simply anxious.
I began to set topics. Enter Medium.
Each week I will be posting a digest of my freewriting. These will be the unedited, original versions of my morning dives into unconscious writings on various topics picked at random. Some will be cohesive and some will be nonsense, but simply publishing them here will, I hope, get me across that other hurdle that has so far proven difficult to mount; the fear of failure.
Here we go.