You don’t need writing prompts, you need confidence

One of the scariest things to commit to paper is the thought you had right before reading this sentence. Whether it was something as inconsequential as, “I should probably have lunch soon,” or as earth-shattering as, “I’m a terrible person,” the likelihood of you believing that it’s worth writing down is probably slim to none.

In a nutshell though this is what journaling, morning pages, or brain dumping ask of us. They require us to be present and then to take our most honest thoughts and put them down on paper. …

For instance, do you tell yourself good things happen?

My anxiety sometimes manifests as alphabet soup in my brain. I see all the letters swimming around. I know factually that letters form sentences and when I fall short of being able to concentrate because my anxiety is demanding that all my energy go towards the part of me that’s having trouble breathing, I do the next illogical thing — I start making stories up.

I wing it, completely. I exert full confidence in saying, “I know what the letters are writing out,” but it’s only because I’m playing within my…

We moved across the country in under a week. While the conversations around a potential move had been a part of our every day for a few weeks they all had a fall timeline attached to them. It’s June 8th and we’ve been back on the east coast for a little under two weeks now, so it’s safe to say plans shifted and we acted accordingly.

For me, acting accordingly meant priorities had to shift quickly and drastically. I went from working towards my goal of writing on here every day to not having the bandwidth to write at all…

I was in New York City when stay-at-home orders started going into effect last year. I lived in Midtown, a whole world away from the Uptown neighborhood I’d grown up in. Our apartment touched the sky and made breathing easier as long as you looked up. If you looked down, the city’s footprint reminded you that everyone’s blanket suggestion to “go for a walk” just didn’t fit New York City’s neighborhoods as much.

In lieu of walks, that suffocated me out of fear of bumping into someone and contracting the virus, I learned to nap.

Since then I’ve napped my…

It all started with an email. First the one that I got sent to my inbox by a dear friend with a subject line that read, “Thought this was really cool.”

The body of the email was a link to this Twitter thread:

For context, I am someone for whom Mother’s Day is really hard. After losing my mom when I was 10 years old, Mother’s Day was never the same. I would still get my grandma (legal guardian) a card, but it was always with a sense of nostalgia. …

The question I posed in the title is an honest one that I hope you’ll take the time to answer. I asked it to myself back in January. I was sitting up against a white wall in my apartment when the Zoom host let me into a room full of other students who were there for the same class — a writing habit class.

I signed up for the class because I wholeheartedly believed that I was lacking motivation, determination, or something else ending in “-tion” and that if I could just find it then I would churn out all…

It serves a different purpose

I love quotes. I keep a note in my phone with lines from books, sentences in articles, or lyrics in songs that I really enjoyed reading. On bad days when the motivation to write isn’t there, I’ll pull up the note and turn to some of my favorite writing-related quotes.

One of my recent additions is from Maren Morris’ “Line By Line” song:

“If I tried to sum it up I know I’d get it wrong
Sometimes if it don’t sound right
I apologize, I just said it ’cause it rhymed”

I was drawn to…

There is nothing that suffocates my creativity more than my misguided belief that I have no time for it. I know this to be factually true and yet, I often come up against the same wall — “I need to do this right now, instead of writing…” or “I don’t have time to write.”

Lately too it’s become apparent that the “hashtag Monday Motivation” culture doesn’t serve me either. …