Yes, I am not exaggerating.
I have done a sum total of nothing for a big fat chunk of about 6 months.
By "nothing", I mean, nothing on this blog or this website or anything to do with this website.
Oh wait! Okay, I did a bit of something. I changes the home page design. Phew! That's something!
A-aah! No it isn't.
Don't listen to her. She wants to make light of this situation. This situation of nothingness. The blog is the one that matters. The moving pieces of ideas in the form of letters on a page matter more than some pixels placed in funky shapes and sizes. We all know that Google's bots care more about the content that is going up on the blog rather than the pixels changing on the home page. Or at least we think so. At least I think so.
For about six months, I have been having a schizophrenic battle in my mind concerning my doing nothing on this blog. One side of me has been itching to write and another, itching to laze around with a bunch of excuses as to why I shouldn't write, I ought not to write or why I can't write.
But finally, the battle has been won. It's been won by the me that's writing this. The me that clicked the blog button and proceeded to start typing this. The me that has been itching to put words down on pages for months!
Ha! Yeah, right, if you were itching, you should have won this battle months ago.
Well, true, but I was waiting for the battle with the Resistance to be fully won for me to take the rightful steps forward. I was waiting for the Will to get stronger than the Resistance. And it finally did.
But how did it all happen?
How?!
How did months and months go by without me getting back to what I enjoy doing? How far and how strongly did the Resistance lure me into its snare? Well, I don't exactly remember the logistics of it all. I just remember the excuse train that I got on. It was a long and windy train ride of bullshit excuses.
So I present to you all of them under the title, how to do nothing for six months or how not to.
1. Make it super easy to do nothing; no obstacles; no evidence; nothing!
How? By having a blog that has no obvious dates on each blog post so that you can easily go for months in between writing each one and an unsuspecting reader won't notice the gaps. Sneaky.
Okay, guilty! I am not sure why I removed the dates a while back. I just wanted to be free from the pressure of dates.
Ha! Yes, and the pressure of responsibility!
Sigh!
2. Play the busy card
Why? Because you got onto a new project/job that takes all your time and you apparently have no minutes left over to add some meat to the blog post ideas swarming inside your head. Another thing? Play the victim game.
"I'm not good at multi-tasking with huge tasks so I can't handle work and my personal projects."
Sure, you can't handle work and personal projects but you could handle Sketching pretty well, considering the other nothingnesses. So you just decided to prioritise that over writing right?
Ah, well, I guess. Shit.
3. Downplay everything
Oh well, if I don't write, no one will notice because I guess they don't read my stuff much any way.
Ha! They don't read your stuff much because you don't write much.
4. Normalise the crime
The more I didn't write, the more normal it became and the more normal it felt.
"If I already haven't written for 3 months, then what's the point....?"
5. Forget that writing is an art
....and art needs to be done for it's own sake.
But....well, sketching is a bit more important because it's "art"
You are wrong. Writing is much an art as sketching is.
Damn it! I am feeling quite rusty just writing this. Pardon me of the multiple personality writing and the introspective shenanigans. I wanted to directly show what my mind was going through in the past months as I battled with myself to abandon or not to abandon something I love deeply. Writing.
I apologize for the above bullshit excuses that stopped me from getting back to my blog and I would like to assure you that I will do my best to survive the next Tsunami wave of Resistance.
If you are also pausing or stopping yourself from doing something you know you want to do. Something you know you love to do, please be mindful and aware that it is simply the Resistance that's working on you. It's giving you a bunch of very well argued excuses but you shouldn't pay attention to them.
In the book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield is adamant in stating that the Resistance will always be there. Especially when you should be creating something or making something.
When it appears, look at it as a milestone, and not as a stop sign. It's there is tell you that you are on to something. That you are on the right path. It is not there to tell you that you should stay in the shadows.
I hope you'll be strong in the battle.
I hope we'll be strong in this battle.
Keep creating your art. Keeping making things. New things. Old things. Never-been-seen-before things.
Resistance is nothing. And this means, either, that it makes you do nothing, or that it actually is nothing.
Let's make it the latter.