Ebb and Flow
Following your own road...
There’s so much great advice out there on just about any topic. My husband learned to build a violin from scratch on YouTube. (I know, he’s ridiculously talented.) And after watching too many hours on how to rebuild old BMW cars with my son, I could almost be fooled into thinking I’m a mechanic. (Not really, but you get the point.)
The wealth of information at our fingertips is incredible. And overwhelming. And sometimes down right discouraging.
Early on in my writing life, I landed in the overwhelm. Heck. Today, I landed in overwhelm. Different contexts, but the same paralysis.
I’m doing this all wrong.
Often it’s driven by the desire to know that I am expending my efforts wisely. That I’m not squandering my most precious resource, time, chasing my tail. And from that place I look to others that have captured something I haven’t and try to learn.
(Don’t hear what I am not saying…LEARNING IS CRITICAL. Being open to grow is vital. If we shut out all input we can stunt our development.)
Sometimes though, this learning morphs into something malignant. Comparison. I follow the same ten steps and when the outcomes are vastly different, I interpret failure instead of acknowledging there are other factors at play, or that growth is rarely captured in a single metric.
Added to this sense of shortcoming, the voices pitching their path to success rarely leave space for divergence or nuance. It may be the Enneagram 9 in me that grates to go against the flow, but the further along I the author road I journey, the more I am confronted with the fact that I cannot hope to follow every single piece of advice, or learn every skill I’m meant to perfect.
Not only is it unrealistic, but in doing so I run the risk of giving up the very soul of my work to fit into a generic box where I will never belong. This choice shows up again and again between when I’m tempted to squeeze myself into the hustle culture machine and value production over process. Algorithm over authenticity. Success over sanctity.
If I believe stories have value, then I can take the time to craft them well. If I believe community is built by presence, then I don’t have to chase content. If I believe impact is measured by the people a story touches, then my books finding that one reader is enough.
I truly believe that each story has it own road and no one’s ‘ten steps’ is going to fully capture the journey we need to take. Of course, we will continue to learn, grow, and develop. And understanding all of this maybe today, we trust ourselves.
One Week - 7 Chapters!
As of today, the first seven chapters of Earthbound are on my YouTube channel to listen to for free! A new chapter will drop everyday until the whole book is available.
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the channel already and for those who haven’t who want to find the page easily - here is the link! (You can also find it under @ kateewrites on YouTube)
Wise as always, my friend. Glad we’re on this crazy journey together.