Don’t Run, Show Up
Overcoming writer’s block
Ever heard of writer’s block? Of course you have, you’re a writer, and you’re on Medium, so you’ve probably heard everything there is to know about writer’s block: why it comes to be, how it comes to be, how and why you can stop it from being. But what is it really?
Writer’s block is perfectionism.
It’s the idea that what we write, whatever we write, is art — gold-brilliant-genius — and therefore is sustained only in perfection.
What I mean by this is that we think that we have to be perfect each and every time we sit down and write, because to do so means we’re real writers — that not to do so means we’re not real writers.
Not really, anyway.
So when that day comes and we hit publish, and the piece we’ve been slaving on for the past week or two, maybe a month, gets hardly any likes, comments, shares, etc., we think we’ve failed.
And that’s when the perfectionist mindset kicks in — the idea that we’re not good enough, that our writing is shit and we’ve completely overestimated our worth.
And then we stop writing, because we’re not “perfect.”
Yet this isn’t true — we haven’t failed — because writing, like any art form, is imperfect.
