Insomniac Nightmares

“I don’t wanna.” “I don’t feel like it.” “I don’t think I can.”

I’m very familiar with these mantras; I hear them often enough from my own lips. But sometimes you can shove them aside and find something worthwhile in doing the work regardless of whether you feel like it or not. The almost 8,000 words written on assorted writing prompts in the last week and a half or so says that’s the case, anyway.

Still, sometimes it’s hard to do it. When your body and brain don’t want to let you, when everything seems stacked against it, when it seems pointless do to. But this last week I pushed through that, and made progress, and feel like I should be proud of that.

There’s not going to be a second writing prompt tonight – getting too late in the day and I have other things I must do – but at least I know I still can do it even when I feel like I don’t want to, and there’s plenty more to come. After all, I’m only about 1/26th of the way through the goal of a writing prompt a day for a whole year.

Thinking about it that way makes it seem worse, somehow. Makes me feel like there’s so many to go instead of being satisfied with what I’ve managed already and the knowledge that I can keep going. “Eyes on the prize” is probably a phrase I need to remove from my vocabulary; thinking about the end from the beginning is just disheartening to me.

What keeps you out there going when the going gets tough? What to you say to yourself when your inner voice says “I don’t wanna”? Let us know down below.