I finished yoga teacher training. I never taught, outside a handful of private lessons – too afraid someone would get hurt trying to do what I showed them, that I’d be responsible for a body I didn’t fully understand. I’m circling the same fear now with this writing project. I don’t tell anyone what to do. I just say what happened to me and stop there. I’m still braced like it’s the yoga room. Still afraid of a kind of responsibility that was never actually mine.
Reading looks like a virtue instead of a vice
I’ve spent years reading other people’s conclusions instead of reaching my own, hunting for proof that my opinions aren’t good enough to trust. I tell myself one day I’ll have my own answers. I’ll be brave enough to stand up to scrutiny, brave enough to stand for something. For now, it’s easier to get lost in someone else’s opinions than to publish my own.
The cost of knowing
I make choices that no one understands, and I can’t explain. The logic doesn’t hold up. The evidence says otherwise. There’s an insistence underneath that doesn’t care. I used to give in to the louder voices. It took decades of wondering why I kept creating outcomes I never intended before I learned to trust the insistence.
Rules that help build the work versus rules that are just permission slips
A woman I follow keeps a five-year journal and switches ink color every month. I caught myself admiring the discipline, but then I caught what it might also be. My morning pages have rules too. Some of them are why the practice has lasted. Some of them, I’m less sure about. The page doesn’t need a system to exist. But maybe I need one to feel like I’m allowed to be writing on it.
Form follows volume
I keep wanting to know the structure before I have the material. But the structure is downstream of the volume. Right now, the only task is to capture the words. The shape of the work becomes clear later, or it doesn’t, and either way the capturing is what makes the difference.
Writing is transcription, not lightning
I was waiting to feel inspired. I thought writing meant waiting for something to descend. The actual job is quieter than that. You sit down. You write what you’re already thinking. That’s it. Just your thoughts on a page.
We invent noble reasons to walk away from what bruised us
It took my whole life to admit I might be a writer. I put it out there. The world consistently didn’t get it. I told myself I must not be one – real writers feel divinely inspired, and I never did. That story let me walk away without admitting I was walking away because it hurt.
Writing is how I spend time with myself
I realized mid-entry that this process isn’t about creativity or output. It’s about being a good friend to myself. That I even wrote that sentence shows how much has changed. There was a time I didn’t know how to do that at all.
What if sharing your faulty thinking is the help?
I’m afraid to publish my thoughts because I don’t want to be attacked for my beliefs. But then I think about every writer I’ve trusted – they weren’t showing me their certainty. They were showing me their confusion, carefully named. That’s not faulty thinking on display. That’s the work.