Writer's Guilt

Some days, I want to write. Other days, I don’t. Today is one of the latter, and yet I still wrote this. Why?

I tried over and over, time and time again to write today. With the school year coming to a close and exams beginning next week, I have an inordinate amount of free time on my hands, time that I wanted to fill writing. All I have to show for my efforts though is a blank screen, a blinking cursor, and more guilt than I know what to do with.

Some days, inspiration drives me to write. Other days, I get caught in the heat of the moment and can’t help but write about the most popular news story. More often than not though, maddeningly often, it’s not inspiration or competition that pushes me to shut everything out and write for a while, but a crushing feeling of guilt. Guilt that I haven’t written anything for one, two, or three days; guilt that I spent my time not writing. This isn’t at all unusual; I do it almost every week. Just as Monday comes back around every seven days, so does this stupid cycle, and I hate it. I do it partly out of fear, reasoning that if I don’t write or at least post something every day, the small readership I do have will disappear. The other part of it though, by far the lion’s share, comes from this arbitrary quota I force upon myself. I have a blog, after all; it follows that it is my prerogative, as the owner of that site, to write and to write often.

But you know what? I’ll write on the days I’ll write, and I won’t on the days I won’t. Today is the last day I let guilt drive me to write, lost readership or not. Here’s to not writing and not feeling guilty about it. Cheers.