On fleeting inspiration and embracing imperfection

It's been 6 weeks since I've published anything, I'm uninspired, so here are some words.

Oops, I did it again. I started a project and then abandoned it as soon as the first sign of fleeting inspiration/disinterest reared its head! This is an easy one to blame on starting a new job (yay!), or being 6 weeks away from my due date (yay and eek!), or a very familiar symptom of ADHD (pour one out for all of my former fleeting hobbies, just naming a few: computer keyboard building, playing tennis, half marathon training, Animal Crossing, photography, any of the instruments I’ve started to learn how to play over the last 2 decades, jewelry making, etc. You all brought me periods of joy and fulfillment, albeit brief, and for that I am grateful).

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write. I currently have 8 drafted posts living in my Substack dashboard, just waiting for another round of inspiration to be finished beyond that opening paragraph (some I fear are too late to publish, like the post I started on my 32nd birthday a month ago about birthdays or the letter I wrote to the NYCDOL about the unemployment process). But every time I sit down to write something, I just haven’t felt inspired enough, or what I want to write about is interesting enough. Or I try to squeeze in a post about a specific topic that I don’t fully care about or feel committed to and then I feel like I can’t be fucked to finish it (or in many cases, take it past that first paragraph). So I don’t finish, or don’t start, and I say ‘next time’.

I didn’t have this post scheduled or have the intention to try to get something written this weekend. I didn’t wake up today with a sudden and unwavering inspiration to write. I woke up this morning at 6:45 am, 2 hours and 15 minutes before my 9 am weekend alarm was set to go off, with crippling heartburn (thank you, pregnancy). I laid in bed for a solid 20 minutes, trying to go back to sleep, but my very full bladder forced me out of bed (thank you, pregnancy). I got back in bed, but laying down makes the heartburn worse, so I took the L and realized I was up for the day. I grabbed my phone to play today’s Wordle, but it wasn’t immediately obvious after 2 guesses so I put that down to come back to later. I then looked at my laptop that was sitting on my nightstand and I opened it. The episode of Private Practice I was watching last night was paused on screen, waiting for me to resume. A thought flashed through my brain almost as quickly as some of my other short-lived hobbies: “Don’t press play yet! Is there something productive I can do this morning, to make something out of being up too damn early on a Sunday”.

As usual, my brain first flashed to the seemingly endless list of things that I could do around the house: there are clean dishes to put away and a few dirty ones in the sink to replace them with. There’s laundry to fold, and more laundry to clean. The floors in the kitchen could be mopped (as they always can — our kitchen floors have the innate ability to look absolutely filthy after about 30 minutes of use). “Ok, but is there something productive I can do this morning from bed???”

Good point, brain. It’s too early to be romping around the house! I opened my work calendar to see if there was anything I could do to get ahead of my week, but immediately stopped myself—it is the day of rest, after all. That tiny brain voice squeaked “What about that newsletter you started, that you’ve been meaning to get back to, but every time you go to write you don’t think your writing is good enough or interesting enough or inspired enough, so you end up ignoring it, which makes you realize you’re repeating a very familiar pattern or not following through, which in turn makes you feel guilty, and so you ignore it further. And then you think about the fact that you suckered people into actually paying for it, and so you feel even more guilty which makes you bury yourself even deeper into that part of you that is quite avoidant”. Well damn, brain.

So, I opened up to a new post in Substack (as none of my other drafted posts sparked enough interest to continue). I was expecting to write an update on my new job, on some of the things I’ve done over the past 6 weeks, on pregnancy (which, now that I have a new job, I can publically say I AM PREGNANT, which I think everyone reading this knew anyway but I was terrified during my search of being found out and not being offered my next perfect job). I was going to say “I’m not inspired but here is what I’m up to! I’ll write something better and more worthy of your time later”.

But as I started writing, I started thinking: what’s my definition of something worthy of your time? I set a pretty low bar with myself and all of you when starting this newsletter, so why do I think an uninspired update is worse than writing nothing? Why am I apologizing for my caliber of writing before anything is even written? And I realize it’s the same negative self-talk that I have around all of the other things you’ll find in my graveyard of abandoned hobbies. If I’m not good at something pretty immediately or don’t see quick improvement, I lose interest and tell myself I’m not good enough to do that thing and slowly let it die. This has been something that has been present in me for as long as I can remember. It’s now, in hindsight, a very obvious symptom of ADHD (and also an effect of the rejection sensitivity that rears its head for many ADHDers), but growing up I never had the awareness or language to understand that. I’ve always thought it’s just a me problem, that I can’t enjoy something for too long or get good enough at anything to have any interesting hobbies. So instead of thinking of this as something that’s just inherently Julie, I am trying to push past that and just be more okay with mediocrity. I like to think I’m getting more out of this morning than I would’ve had I just watched some Private Practice (even though I’m at a juicy part of the series), even if I wasn’t super inspired when I got started.

What started as an uninspired life update I didn’t think was good enough to share with the world has I guess turned into a reflection on inspiration and perfection. As I get older, and especially as I begin to enter into motherhood, I am trying to practice being okay with being imperfect but doing the damn thing anyway. When it comes to raising kids, it’s clear to me that commitment, following through, and showing up are often and usually more important than being inspired or perfect in what you’re doing. This might be a weak parallel to draw, but I never want my kids to think I didn’t follow through on my word regardless of the reason. You also can’t just be like “I changed that diaper like an idiot, I guess I’m done changing diapers!”

This is also a good reminder that sometimes you just have to start, and what comes later may surprise you. If I hadn’t followed my stream of consciousness into the abyss and focused instead on my goal of just providing an update, I wouldn’t have written this, and I might’ve been so bored by my update I might not have published anything at all.

I think I’ll end this here by saying this: thanks for reading, even when I abandon you for a month and a half. I am realizing I would rather publish uninspired, half-baked thoughts than publish nothing at all. So, I cannot promise that what’s to come is going to be any good, but I can promise that I am going to try to get my thoughts out there a little bit more frequently. My due date is in 6 weeks, so I might need to go a little bit quiet once the baby gets here (because apparently, parenthood is hard???)

So, here’s to doing things even when we’re not perfect or inspired or if they’re not 100% what we want to do in the moment. And despite that, to still knowing that doing them will be better than not doing them. To being okay with hitting that ‘publish’ button, even if you don’t know what exactly you’ve written or aren’t sure how to end it.

My 9 am weekend alarm goes off in 12 minutes. I’m off to make some coffee that will certainly make my heartburn worse but make the rest of my life better. And in between writing and editing this post, I ended up finishing today’s Wordle in 3, which is pretty good considering I had no idea what the word could be 30 minutes ago.

Wordle 715 3/6*
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