I felt like I was being held back, but the chains were self inflicted.
My friend KimM calls it “ghost chains”, the feeling that something is stopping you from moving forward. I’ll vouch that sometimes, that’s a real thing — depression, anxiety, illness, trauma, and the list goes on of situations when the chains are less ghostly and more like lead.
But then there are those time where we just keep repeating, “I don’t know why but I just can’t get started/finish/plan/abandon this project!”
This one book I’ve had in stasis for a year and half, nearly completely written except for editing and epilogue, has been held hostage by ghost chains that I could not seem to break. I couldn’t explain it, or justify it.
This week my therapist looked at me kindly (always a bad sign) and said: “You are doing a lot of things, there is nothing holding you back from those. It’s possible that maybe you have just chosen not to work on that book?”
And that…that was it. I knew it as soon as she said it. There are no ghost chains, there is no depression or other internal barrier, there is nothing but my choice not to work on this book.
Reframing the question from “why ghost chains????” to “why did I make that choice?” has been a eye-opening. I’m not in a place right now to explain it all and lay out why this book has been so difficult to approach, but it has a lot to do with how, over this past year, I’ve gone from being required by “should” to being motivated by “want”. While I love the book, there were a lot of “shoulds” surrounding the eventual publication of it that I was not looking forward to.
I decided then and there to just finish the book and let it go. Stop beating myself up for not doing this or that thing the “right” way, the way I should, and focus more on the direction I want to take my writing career.
I think maybe that’s gonna get me somewhere good.
