I haven’t made a blog post in a few weeks, and I want to talk about that.

Yesterday, I wrote over two thousand words for my new novel, over a thousand words for an article I’m writing, and still managed to meet up with family for lunch, go to my writers group, and take a nap to make up for my lack of sleep the night before. My day was the perfect balance of productive and fun. But somehow at the end of the day, I still found myself thinking about the things that I am behind on. No blog posts, no poetry posts, lower account engagement… the list goes on.

I’m not unfamiliar with having a perfect day and then spending the evening after dissecting every single thing that happened. And I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one. Especially as writers, it can become easy to slip into vicious cycles that hold us back in our creativity, as well as our everyday lives. This can be perpetuated by our own internal issues such as anxiety or imposer syndrome, but also from outside sources such as influencers on social media and any other unsupportive non-creatives. It’s very important that we as authors face these issues head on and attack both of those types of negative inputs.

For me, the internal problems stem from a need to do everything, do it myself, and do it well, so no matter how much I do, what I don’t do always catches up with me. How to handle that? Self awareness. It’s something that I have far from mastered, but actively work to pursue. If you can recognize the hard work of others, you can recognize it in yourself. Looking at the things you have accomplished from the perspective of an outsider, and knowing that you would be proud of yourself if you were someone else completely changes the way you view your hard work. Most of us are far more critical of ourselves than we would be of anyone else. Leaning into that will do nothing but block your creativity.

The external problems can be a lot easier… or a lot harder to handle. They could be easier if you can cut them out. If you’re following a content creator who makes you feel bad about the amount of writing you do in a week, you can simply unfollow them. If there’s a person in your life who is doing this, that’s a little more complicated. The best way to go handle that is to remember that someone’s perception of your success is not the same as the actual thing. No one but you understands the work that it has taken for you to get this far, which means they shouldn’t in a place to make you feel guilty about it.

I can’t say that I’m even close to figuring out how to deal with the specific set of problems that come along with being a writer. The writing part, that’s easy. It’s the mental weight of being a creator that trips us up. The best encouragement I can offer is to remember that undervaluing your work should never the price of being a writer. Shifting your attention is not quitting. Falling behind is not the end.