“I am not sure if it’ll be a second book.”
The thought had been tucked deep within me for months but I had not said it out loud to someone. But there on Thursday, sitting at lunch with my new boss, he asked how the second the book was coming and I answered honestly. It almost surprised me a little bit that I answered it the way I did. I had become a master of jumping over the hurdle of the question, “how is the book coming?” by nonchalantly saying, “working on it when I can.” What I wasn’t saying is that I hadn’t opened the document in months. What I wasn’t saying was that I felt so much pressure when it came to the book.
Amongst the rumblings of “you are going to do big things” and “you are so good at writing,” I adopted this mentality that what I am valued for is what I do. Not only what I do but the magnitude in which I do those things. Somehow even writing was becoming something that I felt like I was failing at or disappointing people with. If I could just finish book #2 then I would meet the expectations of the people around me. If I could do that, then I was using my potential to the fullest. This was some cheap lie the enemy had sold me, and I bought it. I bought the fact that if I was going to tell people I was a writer then it meant I better write another book. This became a tug-a-war game with something I truly do love to do. I love to write. However, it was becoming not fun. It became constantly checking word counts to see how close I was to being done. It became setting unrealistic expectations of “I will finish it by the end of the year.” I started to quickly see the magic was fading and I wasn’t willing to let that keep happening.
That first came in the form of freeing myself up and for a few months claiming, “I don’t want to write another book” and stopped writing altogether. Spoiler alert – that wasn’t the answer. After that, I just decided I was going to write without any intentions. Write just to write. Not to post anything. Not with even any big idea in mind. Unedited. Not polished. Just write. Might sound like a no-brainer but it wasn’t something I practiced regularly. The amount of notes on my phone and Google documents on my computer from the last six months are numerous. And somewhere along the way, there came this newfound freedom that it doesn’t have to be a book. I was writing myself back to the childlike joy of what writing was for me long before a domain with my name on it became a thing or there was ever even the thought of writing book #1. I was getting back to understanding not what my writing might do for other people but what it does for me.
I was not writing to produce a product.
I was writing to experience Him.
It is why I could without hesitation and confidently say, “I am not sure if it’ll be a book.” Because I had finally started to see that I am no less of a writer if I never write another book again. I am no less of a writer if I never post another thing on my website. I am a writer because God wired me this way. Long ago a little girl discovered how she made sense of the world and found Jesus was the in the sentences she strung together. Mostly misspelled and definitely without any punctuation. That is where I am going back to. That is the place I want to write from – a little girl wanting to find Jesus. Writing – it is a gift that I believe the Lord has given me and what a tragedy it would be if experiencing the gift was robbed from me because I decided to live in a place that focused only on “what will it be?”
Sure, that might mean all of these words one day do become a book. But I am freeing myself from the pressure to know how all of this plays out. I don’t want to write to make something. I want to write to say something. And I want to be sensitive to when God says these words are for the benefit of others. I don’t want to sit back and wait because the end product isn’t finished. It makes me wonder how much creativity is sitting bottled up because it might not fit the mold of what we thought. Don’t hear me say that I am dismissing any type of long-term project. Not at all. Hear me say that for those of you who maybe have felt like me – that it has to look a specific way or be a specific thing – it doesn’t.
So who knows, maybe one day I will have a second book. But I am going to stop saying, “I am writing a second book.” And just let it be, “I am writing.” What God decides it will be, it will be. The pressure is off of me to figure that out. For now, I want to just write and as God says it is fit to share, share. There doesn’t have to be a finished “book” for that to be the case. Regardless of how they are formatted, words are words. A form of communication. And when they are inspired by the Holy Spirit, what they are supposed to do, they will do. Less about what I am supposed to make. More about what God wants me to say.
To my fellow creatives, put the pen to paper today. Put the brush in the paint. The fingers onto the keyboard. All while praying:
God this is a gift that you have given me. Let my main priority be to experience the giver of the gift while I do this.
