I circle the drain of I thought. I thought I’d find a writing routine by now. I thought I’d be so excited about this course that my normal pitfalls of procrastination would have no space to arrive on the scene. I thought I’d read enough about writing that I wouldn’t be surprised by the emotions that came up, ready to hold procrastination’s hand and run off into the sunset and leave me blinking foolishly at the cursor, without a single word on the page. I thought I’d wrapped my head around not having to prove a thing to anybody, around doing this for myself — no need for imposter syndrome if I wasn’t trying to make these early assignments public to anyone but my instructor, right? The contrast of what I thought and what I learned, even around this very first assignment, proves to me, ultimately, that I am, afterall, still as much human as any other writer finding themselves staring into the abyss of a blank page, stored up with overwhelming intention to simply write.

I received my course materials and found the most clever ways to avoid diving into the writing itself. I dusted old writing books off the shelf and bought new ones I deemed “crucial reads” before starting. I decided I also needed the right space, lighting, emotional bandwidth, [you name it] in order to sit down and write. I devised other “musts” like a new journal I’d dedicate to the experience of the course, additional highlighters in other colors, in case I wanted to categorize the highlights, new pens and pencils and the list goes on. I even went as far as to think that I needed to secure just the right desk to put in the corner of my living room if I was planning on waking up and writing every morning (the couch, the kitchen table, the desk out in my “Shed of One’s Own” were all unqualified for the job, apparently). These tactics aren’t uniquely my invention. I have an old, worn copy of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield that I’ve come back to several times over the years to kick my own butt. In his framing of this important-work-avoidance, he calls the force that keeps us procrastinating Resistance. An excerpt from the beginning of this book reads “There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

A friend of mine recently sent me a video on Instagram that modeled what is actually happening when astrologers say “Mercury stations retrograde”. Essentially, the planet itself has never moved backwards, but it looks like it is from our perspective on Earth. So Mercury is still moving forward, staying in orbit, (causing our technology to glitch if you believe in that sort of thing), and yet, where we stand, it looks convincingly like it’s going in reverse.

I choose to take this in through a pipe of compassion and directly apply it to my experience. “Nothing is lost. Nothing is wasted,” I often say to friends when they’re going through a hard time or navigating feelings of regret. Even if procrastination, or Resistance as Steven Pressfield would call it, has gotten the best of me yet again, I’m still on track, still moving forward. The deadlines and assignments that bring this human flaw into focus for me are the same deadlines and assignments that are keeping me accountable to this work I’ve talked about for so long but have done very little to make a reality. Have I come up against imposter syndrome more than I’d like to admit? Absolutely. Have I excavated some tender memories while trying to muster the courage to transform them into story? You bet. But the difference this time is that I’ve chosen to be a part of a writing course with a mentor and a support team and a path that is clearly laid out for me to follow. All my fears and faltering may be in the car with me, but at least I’m in motion.

After writing an email to the team at IFW to tell them I was indeed still on track but struggling to get through my own barriers of submitting the first assignment, they encouraged me with a few exercises and parallel struggles of their own in the practice of writing.

My first assignment was a birds-eye-view of my story from two angles, warming up to the practice of writing-for-review and steering the big ol’ ship of my long-stored ideas in a direction I could see my story going. I’d been sitting on the ideas and my first letter to my instructor (responding to their introductory letter I received with my welcome packet) long enough. I organized my scattered notes, stopped thinking myself in circles, and finally solidified the concepts, wrote the letter, and hit the “SUBMIT” button. And you know what? I didn’t die. Matter of fact, I actually felt really, really good.