READER! It's been a WHILE!

I fell of the boat.

(God, I can't take another Ship30 reference).

I've learned a few things:

community is awesome, writers are awesome, and a community of writers? You guessed it, it's swell.

But it's not enough.(That's truth #1)

No magic pill will get me where I want to go.

Especially if I don't know where I am going.

And I like it that I don't. I don't want to know where my life is leading. That seems boring to me?

I just want it to keep moving forward. Discover where it's going.

The thing is, that it won't move, it won't.

The other truth I learned is:

Writing is hard.(truth #2)

Writing is a hobby, a career, a calling. In short, one of those things that you really want to do and that inevitably get interrupted.

Not because life happens(which it does), but because it's hard.

Like Steven Pressfield beautifully puts it in The War of Art: It's a hero and villain story. I'm the hero, and my resistance(which is also me) is the villain.

If I dished out successful essays every day to hundreds of raving readers, my validation-o-meter would have been sitting nicely at the top and my desire to continue dishing out well-received gems would be blooming!

Spoiler alert - it wasn't the case.

And it's vulnerable to shout into the void. It's scary and unknown, and every step feels at the same time genius and stupid.

It's funny how my self-expression, the thing that can come only uniquely from me, is so dependent on external validation.

Creators and artists depend on validation and (except for a selected few), get constant rejection on the way there. That is the design. They learn beauty through understanding what is ugly in them.

And here's the culmination of this piece, last Truth:

The only way is through.(Truth #3)

I'm at the end of the journey, and I feel more inspired and purposeful than ever. I have more clarity, more energy and more desire to write!

Do I consider this a failure? No! The rules are made up anyway! Am I happy with where I am? Tremendously!

Are you?