I Haven’t Been Very Motivated to Write Lately

Two months ago, I hit a writing peak on Medium (I’ve mentioned this before).

August was my strongest month where I was just constantly inundated with inspiration and ideas for article topics.

I’m not sure if maybe it was because I was just so happy to finally witness the fruits of labor — For months, even years now, I had put in a great deal of time and energy into building my “online writing portfolio”, as one would call it. And now, I was seeing some consistent success.

Or maybe it was because I was just holding in a lot of emotions during that streak of creativity and I needed an outlet for release, which enabled me to produce a lot of good writing.

Whatever the case may be, it now appears that my inspiration has dwindled and my ideas lately are sub-par — At least, that’s what the Medium stats are telling me.

To be completely transparent, I’ve just had very little motivation to write lately.

I feel almost like a hypocrite saying this since I’ve written a handful of advice articles about writing such as “What to Do When You Have to ‘Force’ Yourself to Write” or “How to Stay Motivated to Write When No One is Reading Your Work”

For some reason, even writing this article at this very moment is extremely challenging for me.

Let me break it down for you —

Today, I went for a long run earlier in the afternoon, cleaned my apartment a bit, and have just been watching television for the past few hours — For the most part, the day has been somewhat uneventful.

However, every time I passed through my living room, I’d see my laptop on the coffee table, I’d ignore opening it, and then can almost hear it say to me, “Shouldn’t you be writing?”

I mean, what else did I really have going on for the rest of the day? (The answer is nothing. I had zero other plans for today).

Now, I don’t quite know where I’m going with this article to be quite frank, so maybe I’ll just ramble on or maybe I’ll actually come to some sort of conclusion.

Or maybe I’ll end this with my typical uplifting advice that will hopefully help one of you.

Regardless, finding my words lately has been nothing shy of frustrating. It’s been like pulling teeth — And I’m trying to figure out why it’s been so difficult.

I can, however, attribute a few things that have been happening lately in comparison to what was happening when I was on my hot writing streak.

I got really serious about marathon training recently.

I’m running a marathon in less than three weeks and I’ve kind of been focusing more on that rather than putting much effort into writing every day.

I’ve been coming to the realization recently that in order to be really great at one particular thing, you can’t be distracted with too many other things. And right now, that’s exactly the case.

I’m distracted.

I’m putting marathon training before my writing, which I’m not even upset about because running for me aside from writing, is something that I hold very near and dear to my heart.

I just know that by putting more eggs into my running basket, I’m lacking in other areas. After all, I do consider myself a jack of all trades, not necessarily a master of one.

I often put a little too much on my plate at times.

I haven’t been as stressed with work lately.

Which, to me seems really ironic to say because you’d think that having less stress at work would actually allow for me to make more time for writing.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

It’s always amazed me at how people can turn stress, tragedy, anger, or frustration into such amazing works of art, music, writing, and creation in general — Sometimes, I think that some of the best creations come from your lowest moments.

However, right now, I’m not really in a low moment. I’m not that stressed or angry or frustrated with anything aside from the fact that I’m not writing as much as I’d like to.

It’s just funny that now that I’m in a more calm mental state, my writing has taken a hit.

I guess I’ll end with this — I’m not quite sure when or how my motivation to write will resurface again, but I do hope it’s soon because I certainly haven’t felt like I’m on my A-game lately.

For those of you who are frequent readers of mine, you may find this hard to believe or surprising for me to say, but it is true.

I know when I’m at my best and right now, with writing in particular, I’m just not there.

When I am though, I’ll let you know, but for now I’ll just keep writing whatever random things come to mind — Kind of like this article.