My daughter used to do ninja warrior/parkour classes. She stopped in about 3rd grade. But lately, she’s been wanting to try it again, so we went back this week.
She had a great time, wants to go back again.
One of the reasons she stopped was because she kept comparing herself to other kids who were better than her. Kids who were at the gym for hours literally every day, practicing, while she was there 2xs a week. Kids who were on the competitive team.
She was too young to understand that a) there’s almost always someone better than you at everything in life, and b) this was about having fun, not competing, so the only judging she should be doing is if she enjoyed it.
Now she’s heading into 7th grade, and I think she’s finally learning that not everything in life is a competition, and she can do things just because she finds it fun.
I can learn some lessons from her as a writer, because the pandemic killed my creativity, and my writing ground almost to a halt.
I am slowly coming back to it, and I have to remember to enjoy it, and stop comparing myself to other writers. I am not them. They might have been able to write 8 books and get them all published during Covid, but I couldn’t. I spent much of the pandemic struggling with out of control anxiety, where I was lucky to simply accomplish the necessities of life each day.
I can also learn from my daughter because she is not in the same physical shape she was in when she was in 3rd grade. She was actually really good when she was younger. But pre-teen couch potato syndrome has set in (compounded by the pandemic isolation). So she has to build herself back up to it.
I, too, need to build my writing muscles back up. My concentration is not what it was. Just a few hours of work is exhausting. It’s mentally taxing to create! So like my daughter, I need to work back up to my old level.
I’ve just completed the final edits to my middle grade historical adventure, The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone. My co-author and I will now decide whether to make one more attempt at traditional publishing, or go with self-publishing.
And so the return begins.
It’s good to see you flexing your writing muscles, and parkour seems an apt activity for a metaphor about writing. If only our minds could be that adaptive to circumstances.