“I am feeling like I need to confess,” my new writing coach client Darshana Weill wrote in an email to me last week. “I have not written at all. I have writing time set aside for both today and tomorrow, but I also feel stopped. I feel guilt and overwhelm and a bunch of other stuff. I am familiar with this feeling. It’s the feeling that stops me from moving forward at all.”
Darshana may have been panicked about the fact that she hadn’t written at the beginning of this week, but I was not. The “Food Freedom Coach” had produced like crazy the week before. A three-day workshop followed by a day of catch-up had stalled her, but only temporarily. I knew that even if she lacked the writing perspective she needed. Fortunately, she had known enough to contact me immediately, instead of stewing in a broth of self-recrimination. My job as her writing coach was simply to make sure she regained her writing perspective. So I wrote her back on the spot.
“Hi Darshana,” my email read. “Thanks for reaching out. You cannot expect yourself to write daily. You’ve embarked on a marathon. You wrote a ton on your first stretch. You’ve slowed a little now, in part because life got in the way. (What a concept!) Now just start back up. No worries. You’ll be fine.”
And she was. The writing she produced this week may not have been voluminous, but it had the raw, emotional power that her previous writing had lacked. In my book, that’s one hell of a week.
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