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tweet by @killdads:

I just read a Reddit post about feelings of inadequacy and jealousy in relation to other’s writing, that clawing in your stomach when you read something that is so gripping, so incredibly paced, or simply so wildly popular (dripping with kudos, comments, what have you) that you just want to quit, because you can’t write like that, you will never be as talented, as popular, etc, etc.

It’s such a ugly emotion that I hate to even admit to it, but I just feel like so many writers need to hear this and need to know they are not alone when they’re overcome with this feeling.

The thing that has really helped me is remembering that I’m the only person on earth who can tell the stories I tell.

Every person has a history and background that makes them uniquely capable of creating what they do.

I try to equate it to music. There are indie artists whose music I adore (Bright Eyes is a band that specifically comes to mind). What if your favorite band listened to Mozart or Beyoncé and thought, I will never be as talented at composing as Mozart or as famous as Beyonce, and therefore, I will never write another song.

How sad would you be, how bereft, if the artists you love gave up because they weren’t “the best?”

You are that perfect writer, not to everyone, but to someone.

That means something. It is so difficult to remember, but it all comes back to self-esteem. You are worthwhile and your writing is worthwhile NOT because it’s the best, but because there’s only one person in the world who could write it, and there is someone out there who needs to read it. Maybe you can make a stranger smile or feel or laugh, if only for a minute, and what an incredible gift that is.

So I urge you not to dim your shine for any reason. Keep going, find your audience, get better, KEEP AT IT. The worst thing you can do is give up, because that’s the only sure way you will never be that kind of amazing writer you wish to emulate.

There is absolutely NO shame in having a ton of projects on the go and switching between or even dropping them on a whim.

Hobbies are meant to be FUN.

You can have 20 writing projects, or knitting, or whatever your thing is, and putting them down for a bit or abandoning them is a-okay.

I personally would never think that someone who started playing a video game and then decided to play another before it was finished was a quitter, so why am I so judgemental towards myself?

I’m not trying to be like “ohoho look at me I’m such a good friend”, I’m saying the second I stopped going “I wish I had friends who would invite me to tea parties” and just. hosted the tea parties myself? I still got to do the thing. I still got to see my friends. I still got to be happy with them.

It’s a lot of energy, I get that. Especially if you’re putting in all this effort, but not getting any back.

But I think that’s the reason no one does it. I mean we’re so worried we’ll start doing all these things and our friends won’t like it or won’t be into it, so we just don’t.

Only last week my friend messaged me, asking if I wanted to go stargazing with her. When I forget about our weekly virtual tea party, another friend called me to ask if I wanted them to host it this week.

I’ve been invited on hikes and picnics and pie making competitions over zoom, and it all sort of started with me going out of my way to be “that friend”.

Adulthood does require a lot of paperwork (as does my specific job), and I have also sometimes struggled to keep up with it at times! I have ADHD that I manage without medication, and that has required me to come up with a lot of creative strategies for managing deadlines and responsibilities. If you’re struggling, I recommend:

Use the technology that’s available. There are a lot of apps and programs out there to help you keep track of things, and many of them are free. Ideally, look for apps that you can sync across multiple devices. I personally relied on Google Calendar to get me through graduate school - you can enter deadlines and tasks, and set up reminders for yourself to jog your memory. It also gives you a visual look at your schedule, so you can see where you have space to slot extra tasks into your day. In addition to Google Calendar, I recommend checking out Any.Do, Habitica, Bear, EverNote, and 24Me. You can also use the built-in reminder app on your phone, and if remembering to jot things down is a struggle for you, iPhone users can verbally tell Siri to set a reminder for them - I use this function of Siri several times per day. There is no shame in being dependent on technology to manage your life; there are great programs out there, and it’s okay to use the tools that are available. It doesn’t matter which app you choose, or how many apps you choose - it’s about finding a system that works for you.

Try bullet journalling or using an organizer. If technology just doesn’t work for you, you can also try using pen-and-paper methods to keep your life on track. You can find pre-made organizers and agendas at any bookstore, complete with calendars, to-do lists and daily agendas. If you want more control over format, you can also look into starting a bullet journal. It may take a while to set up your bullet journal and get the hang of using it, but when you’re done, you have a fully customized organizational system that can help you track whatever needs tracking in your life. I personally use a bullet journal, and I find it immensely helpful. 

Invest in a filing cabinet. Shoving important documents into random drawers and cupboards is an excellent way to not be able to find those documents when you need them. Invest in a small filing cabinet, and take an afternoon to sort and label your important papers. All your essential ID documents, school paperwork, financial paperwork, etc, should be properly sorted and labelled so that you know exactly what documents are where. The time that you spend creating and setting up this system will save you a lot of panicked hours digging through random piles of paperwork you shoved into a drawer in the future. 

Automate whatever tasks you can. If your bill payments can be automated, do it. If you have products that you regularly use, set up an automatic order of them on Amazon. If you’re going on vacation and don’t want to waste hours emailing everyone to let them know, set up an automatic reply that lets people know when you’ll be back. If it can be automated, automate it. The best way to keep track of deadlines is to minimize the number of deadlines you need to keep track of. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and stress.

Write everything down. The easiest way to miss a deadline is to forget to write it down. Never assume that you are going to remember something just because you promised yourself you would. If you have something you need to remember, jot it down, enter it into whatever organizational tool you are using, and make sure you set a reminder. Seeing all your tasks written out can help you figure out which deadlines are coming up first, and plan your time accordingly.

Do chores on a schedule. Trying to wing your deadlines and household chores is a really awesome way to find yourself frantically doing laundry at 2 in the morning because you have a big presentation in the morning and you’re totally out of clean clothes. Figure out a regular weekly schedule for your chores, and enter them into your calendar. Not only will this help you visualize how much time your chores take up every week, but doing chores regularly saves you a lot of time and energy - it’s much better to spend 10 minutes per week wiping down the shower stall, rather than spending 3 hours trying sandblast a month’s worth of soap scum off the tub.

Break large projects down into small, manageable chunks. Let’s say you have a huge term paper due three months from now at the end of the semester. Your grades and sanity both depend on you not waiting until the last minute to write that paper. But when you think about how much work needs to be done to write that paper - thinking of a topic, researching, outlining, writing, proofreading, citing, formatting, etc - it’s easy to get completely overwhelmed, and procrastinate working on the paper until the 11th hour. Instead of having an all-out, last-minute panic, start by breaking large projects down into tasks that don’t seem so daunting. If you need to write a 20-page paper with at least 10 cited sources, start by giving yourself 2 weeks to find 5 good sources to cite. Then in the next two weeks, find 5 more sources to cite. Then in the two weeks after that, write the outline. You get the picture. When tasks are broken down, it becomes a lot less overwhelming to do them, and you make much better progress. 

Learn to prioritize. There are two things you need to think about when you’re trying to prioritize a task - how urgent it is, and how important it is. An urgent task is one that has to be done soon; an important task is one that has a very important outcome for you. All the tasks in your life fall somewhere on the urgent-important spectrum. If tax deadline is in three days and you haven’t filed yet, filing your taxes is both urgent and important. Taking the garbage out when the can is full is urgent, but not important - nothing in your life will go terribly wrong if you don’t do it. If you want to be a writer someday, working on your writing is important, but not urgent - there’s no deadline, but your life will be hugely negatively impacted if you don’t do it. In general, when you’re prioritizing, tasks should be done in the following order: important + urgent > urgent but not important > important but not urgent > neither important nor urgent. Sometimes, prioritizing means letting things slide if they aren’t worth the time and effort to do them. When you’re a student, this often means taking a hard look at how important something is. If you have a pop quiz tomorrow that’s worth 2% of your grade, and a midterm in two days worth 25% that you are completely unprepared for, your best bet is to take a quick skim of your pop quiz notes and spend the bulk of your time studying for the midterm, even if it means getting a mediocre grade on the quiz.

Overestimate how much time you’ll need to complete a project. How much time do you think it’s going to take you to finish that homework assignment that’s due next week? Think about all the contingencies - assume that you get stuck a couple times and have to scour the internet for answers, or call up your friend who took the class last semester. Maybe you estimate that the assignment should take 4 hours total to complete. Perfect - now schedule yourself 6-8 hours to actually get it done. People tend to dramatically overestimate their own efficiency, and underestimate the time it takes them to actually finish important tasks. If you don’t want to be scrambling all the time, the best thing you can do is intentionally overestimate how much time you need. 

Do a regular “life audit”. Every 1-2 weeks, block out some time to sit down and take stock of everything that’s going on in your life. How did the previous week go? Did you get everything done that you needed to? Is there anything you need to catch up on? What are the things that are coming up in your life? What needs to get done this week?  Are you making progress toward your goals? How’s the household chore situation? What do you need to prioritize for the week ahead? Is there anything that you’re wasting too much time on? Are there any papers or files that you need to put away in your filing cabinet before they get lost? Checking in with yourself regularly gives you a chance to catch small issues before they can snowball into enormous problems. 

Staying on top of deadlines is a skill, and it’s easy to mess up every now and then. We all do it. The key is to keep trying, and to keep striving for improvement. 

Cut your food into small pieces, make the font size 30 on your e book, use straws to drink, get a pen that’s comfortable to hold, take more naps, walk slowly, eat another cookie, buy velcro shoes, re-watch the part you couldn’t understand the first time, write things on your hands so you don’t forget it… whatever you want and/or need

You are not being self-destructive. You just have two deeply rooted and fundamentally contradictory ideas about what is best for you: doing the thing, and not doing the thing. 2. Get curious about this pain that your brain is so worried about. When we understand exactly what pain we fear and why, we can work on reducing those fears. This is why I think treating resistance as an opaque external force is such a mistake. Internal resistance is not immovable — it responds to reason, to alternative scenarios, to making space for the emotions that seem like such a threat — but to shift it you have to understand its particular content for you. 3. Negotiate. You may not be able to figure out what is motivating your internal resistance immediately, and even once you do, it can take some time to figure out how to address your fears and worries about pain in the offing. In the meantime, I suggest haggling. Will your internal resistance allow you to work for 10 minutes? What about five? If you can’t work formally, could you talk into your phone? How about brainstorming in the bathtub?

You can create so much increased space in your brain just moving from “I need to apply will power so I stop being so bad and lazy” to “I’m experiencing a lot of internal resistance, let me get inventive in working with it today”.

symptoms of stress:

managing your stress can include:

building resilience (through therapy)

positive journaling

showing gratitude

learning relaxation techniques

learning time management

regularly making time for self care

cognitive restructuring (through therapy)

eating healthily and keeping yourself hydrated 

getting enough sleep 

properly socializing in healthy communities 

finding a reason to laugh 

awarding yourself over punishing yourself (positive reinforcement) 

creating lists of priorities & removing the unnecessary