Alright,
, you got me.For months now I've been sitting on a project that feels super meaningful and aligned with me and after the initial high, I have not been able to continue working on it.
A story of creative dysregulation.
The project feels big and important to get right.
It feels like it could be the WORK OF MY LIFE *no pressure*.
👋 Hi part of me who thinks seeing it this way will motivate me to create. It has been overwhelming so far.
What is the project?
I want to write about relationality.
I want to make relationality more of a thing, a discipline, a concept we know how to talk about.
I want a place where people can come, read some things, start seeing more about their every day relational dynamics, attend some workshops and find the others who want to grow along this path.
And I just feel like I have been studying this topic my whole life. I feel a neverending source of energy towards thinking about this topic, analyzing relational dynamics, and conducting experiments to test my hunches and theories about how relating works.
I feel like I am sitting on so much content and yet I feel blocked around just writing about it, about systematising it and opening up to feedback about ways in which my thinking does or does not make sense.
There's a lot of intense feelings here and I want to have compassion for myself for struggling to publicly speak about things that I most cherish. It feels human to want to do that and to be afraid to do that (👋 Hi part of me who worries people won’t care).
So today as I was reading Kelly’s book, I got a sense that maybe I just need to start.
I notice that I have been blocked by things I don't need to be blocked by - like choosing the best template for the website on which I will host the writing. Or buying a new domain.
In reality these don't matter as much. I can host it on my personal, existing website for now. Or even simpler, here.
I can just publish a new piece of the puzzle each day and share it online and see what happens. If there is a there there, I will find out, with time.
Something in me believes it will add up to a really cool end vision, but something about trying to put this vision into practice right away is overwhelming.
So I am going to make it simpler.
The thing I know for sure is that every day I learn something new about relationality and I want to create more space in my life to notice it and document it.
I feel excited about just starting to publish something each day for a week, around relationality and see what happens.
These X-day challenges worked great for me before.
I did a 30-day aliveness challenge that really helped me connect with my sense of aliveness.
Then I did a 7-day twitter experiment where each day I posted one tweet and it concluded with an insight about writing from my body.
And recently I did a 7-day process challenge, where each day I described some internal process of mine, which gave me a sense that I can be a prolific writer if my purpose is clear.
I see how much I want this relationality project to be perfect. But this has not helped me engage in it so far.
So I am changing my strategy - I am going to write daily for the next week, sourcing topics from my lived experience and see what I learn this time.
I am going to do it here on Substack, because I think of it as my public journal, which will help me feel like I am writing it primarily for myself.
I am aware of the role that external validation plays in my motivation structures, so I hope this will help me calibrate towards more intrinsic modes of motivation.
I think underneath the fear about speaking more about the things that deeply matter to me, there is a very pure and child-like desire for more connection over it.
I hope that this challenge can help me establish more of an internal connection - between all these parts that are showing up around it, and between my meaning and me.
It’s funny to notice how easily this whole post was to write and edit (not always the case!) and the first blockage I encountered was now. Choosing the right image to go along with. I know aesthetics have relevance for me, but right now it really feels like an unnecessary reason for a blockage. So I am just going to use an image that I created a while ago for the relationality section on my website - a sense of being in alignment with one’s relational field.