Whatever It Is, Just Pick It Back Up

You know the feeling – suddenly you look up and it’s been weeks or months since you did the thing that you used to do every day. And you feel both panicked and exhausted, and the prospect of getting back to it feels like doing a pull up with arms made of noodles. Or, maybe that’s just me?

Falling out of routine can so easily spiral into avoidance, into guilt or shame or procrastination or any number of less savory feelings that ultimately keep us stuck. It starts with letting something else take precedence in a way that feels totally reasonable. You don’t have time this morning to do your stretching, but you’ll do it tomorrow! And then tomorrow, you check your email before getting to the stretches and get distracted, and then it’s time for work. The day after, the snooze button’s siren song gets the better of you. And then all of a sudden, it’s been a week or two or six.

And then… it just feels so. much. harder. to get back to it. Partly because you’ve lost momentum, and partly because there’s a nagging sense that you’re having to “start over.” That somehow you’ve “lost time” and it’s going to be sooooo hard to get back to where you were. Or, like me, you feel guilty for falling off the beam of something that mattered to you, and that guilt keeps you stuck in inertia.

But let’s stop staying stuck! Let’s just pick the fucking thing up again, and give ourselves a gold star for even a millimeter of forward momentum!

It Just Takes a Tiny Bit of Momentum

Last week, I posted to my baking blog for the first time in more than two months – a publication gap that was vastly longer than I’d realized. I knew I hadn’t posted in a while, but I was going to get to it! I just had work and school and exercise and this blog (which I also haven’t been posting to “enough”) that I had to get through first.

There’s so much that can get in the way of our forward momentum. Fear, guilt, overwhelm, hopelessness. And there are so many stories that pop up to tell us we can’t or it isn’t worth it or we’ll get to it eventually. And those stories are bullshit! But they’re powerful bullshit.

Right now, I have substantial drafts of three other posts languishing in my google docs. They either began as part of other posts and got long enough to be broken out into their own or were things I felt inspired to write about two weeks ago but then ran out of steam on before I finished them. 

So, why the fuck am I writing this instead of finishing those? Because we have to go where our inspiration takes us. Pushing myself to keep working on something that doesn’t resonate today, that doesn’t feel good or call to me, is just going to make it harder to get going again. Picking up my metaphorical pen and writing something that interests me is the best way back into momentum. 

We don’t have to fight with ourselves to get going again – we just have to sort out what we’re telling ourselves that’s getting in the way.

What Gets In the Way

I was having a conversation with my best friend last week about how they’ve fallen out of the habit of reading books. They like reading, in theory, but they dropped off a while ago. It just kind of stopped being something they did. And, as we were talking about that, we unpacked something interesting, something that was very sneakily getting in the way…

Because of how they approached reading as a kid (completing books to win prizes from the library), and because of other ingrained beliefs/memories/practices, they had this internalized notion that once you start a book, you have to finish it before you can start the next one. My friend had started a book a year ago and hadn’t finished it (because they rather lost interest in it), and so something inside them was saying “well, you can’t start a new book until you finish that one,” which was very effectively keeping them from reading anything else.

Maybe you can relate to that, maybe not. I can! 

My subconscious (or sometimes my fully conscious, manipulative brain) says, “I can’t start X project until I finish project C that I started six months ago.” Or, “I can’t go back to this thing because of this other thing.” I can’t write a post on this blog if I haven’t been writing on that blog. Or, most apropos to this context, I need to write in the morning when I’m feeling most inspired, but I’m doing this intense morning meditation practice and now I just don’t have the time before school/work. 

So, then things sit. And they languish. And I feel guilty and frustrated with myself for not doing the thing. And then since I haven’t done the thing in a while, I feel even more guilty and frustrated and keep not doing the thing. Etc. etc. etc.

It’s not fun. And it’s also not a unique experience. It’s just how adulting goes. We have a lot of demands on our time and energy now that we have to feed and clothe and clean and house ourselves. None of us are going to be able to maintain momentum on all of the things all of the time.

But whatever it is that we were doing but stopped doing at some point? It’s still there. All we have to do is pick it back up. In order to feel able to pick it back up, though, we often need to unpack the rubble that’s accumulated to get in the way. And to cut ourselves some fucking slack.

We Aren’t Starting Over

Exercise is a good analogy here. If you used to be a runner or a soccer player or a cyclist or a ballerina – you still know how to be those things, even if your body has to get back up to speed. If you used to be super into yoga, you still know how to do the poses even if your body doesn’t do them like it used to. You still know how to ride a bike, even if you can’t go as hard or fast as you used to. You know how to swing a racket, you know how to kick a ball, you know how to throw a frisbee. So you aren’t actually starting from scratch.

We get so caught up in the idea that we’re having to “start over,” as if setting something down for a time means all the work and effort and learning we did to get to where we got suddenly evaporates. But it’s still there! You still have whatever foundation you laid before, it’s just possible that your framing collapsed or the drywall needs to be redone. But you aren’t starting from scratch. And that’s important to remember. You aren’t ever entirely back at square one. 

This comes up in recovery a fair bit when folks have a relapse. It can be incredibly hard to come back into the rooms because it feels like starting over. But regardless of how long a relapse lasted, how long it’s been since someone was in recovery, the time they spent sober isn’t gone. The things they learned and growth they achieved aren’t gone. 

Head injuries aside, you get to hold onto all of your growth and healing and learning – even if you stop applying it for a time. Even if you backslide into unhelpful behaviors or thought patterns, somewhere up in your noggin’, you did start to form neural pathways for the behaviors and thought patterns that you do want. They just need strengthening (again). 

And that just takes a teeny bit of willingness and effort. I will sing the praises of Atomic Habits always and forever, and the basic gist is to start small and keep going an itty bitty step at a time. 

Pull the thing off the shelf and look at it today. Tomorrow, hold it in your hands for 30 seconds. The next day, make one minor addition or adjustment. And so on, until at some point you’re back to doing the thing. Something is always better than nothing when it comes to regaining momentum. And we’re never really starting over; we’re just starting back up.

Right now, I need to remind myself that I haven’t “lost” anything by not posting those drafts I’ve started and abandoned, or for not getting something new up in a few weeks. All of my posts from the last six months are still here. My capacity to communicate ideas in a way that at least a handful of people find engaging is still here. The vast array of ideas I want to write about is still here – even if my capacity to wrangle one of them onto the page has been a bit more elusive. 

It’s all still here, not lost, not wasted. I’m not starting over. I’m just starting up again. 

[And if you need a bit of motivation, watch this video to get you started! I watched it every day I sat down to write my fucking dissertation, and eventually the damn thing got done.]