#because my brain starts transitioning from workworkwork mode to 'what did we learn

[whentherewerebicycles]

hello friends! this afternoon i finished a complete first draft of a 76,000 word (!!!) story for a fic exchange. it is the longest thing i’ve ever made and, while i’m way too close to it right now to have any kind of objective opinion of it, i think i’m pretty proud of it as a creative work. but i am ESPECIALLY proud of it because i feel like its existence is a testament to how consciously and deliberately i’ve worked over the past couple years to teach myself how to actually see writing projects through to completion. finishing projects is a skill that i used to have very fixed mindset thinking around (“i’m just not the kind of person who finishes things”) and it’s been really good/useful for me to challenge that particular thought pattern, and to build some systems that work for me.

the thing i am learning -- which is a thing i think we all know but must continually learn over and over and over and over again because, idk, brains -- is that when i really struggle with something it’s usually not because i am incapable of doing it, but because something about the mental schema i am using to approach a thing is off, or because my default systems or learned methods of tackling problems don’t quite work for this particular thing. i feel like the different eras of my life have had different core themes or lessons for me, and the core theme/lesson of my early 30s so far has been: if you can’t do it, check your tools, check your methods, and check your environment. usually the thing preventing you from succeeding is because you’re using the wrong tools, or you’re stubbornly persisting with using a method that you think “should” work but isn’t actually well-suited to the problem or task at hand, or your efforts are being hampered by some unresolved thing in your environment (whether it’s your ‘mental environment,’ your social context, or your actual physical environment). making little (or sometimes big) tweaks to tools, process, and/or environment almost always helps you get unstuck or find a new way of doing something that makes it easier & more enjoyable for you personally, even if it isn’t the way you thought you were supposed to be doing it.

anyway! i’m not quite done with this project (i have nine days to finish revisions), but today was the day where, after almost two months of pretty tireless work, i finally realized that i was going to finish for sure.

#i always get Reflective at the end of big projects #which is another way i can tell i'm very close to finishing lol #because my brain starts transitioning from workworkwork mode to 'what did we learn? what's changed? how are we different?' mode