Hello! I’m Amy, a therapist, writer, and photographer. I am passionate about helping people create the lives and relationships they want, and tapping into their own creative impulses. I explore all of this in By Amy Clark, and hope that by me sharing my own journey, I can help you do the same work in your own life. Most of my newsletters are free for everyone. A paid subscription gets you one full poem every month, plus full access to all podcast episodes and courses.

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You know, it’s a funny thing. Sometimes I have no idea what I want to say until I open the document page up and start writing. Suddenly the words appear, and I just start typing, hoping that after I type one word, the next one will appear. The trick, I have found, is to not edit each word when it comes to my brain. If I do, if I hold it back, then it’s like a log in a river that jams up the flow. Nothing else can follow until I get that log out, write that word. Even if I erase it later. Doesn’t matter. I just need it out of the way.

It really calls into question the idea of waiting until inspiration strikes to sit down and write, and reinforces all the recommendations I’ve heard over the years to develop a writing habit. My friend refers to it as letting creative inspiration know where it can find you. If the creative source knows that you will be ready and tuned in at a particular point every day, then it can meet you there.

But if you are more willy-nilly in your creative practice, then when you finally do sit down and ask creativity to meet up with you, that particular energy is already busy, hanging out with the chick down the street who has a regular standing date with creativity. Those two have a hot-and-heavy relationship, because she made time for creativity, when you ignored it, no matter how many times it batted its eyes at you in an attempt to get your attention. By the time you got around to it, creative inspiration had moved on to a more consistent and reliable partner.

Don’t you hate it when you’ve been fighting something for years, and then ultimately you have to admit that all those people were right after all?

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And even so, even knowing the truth of this advice, I still struggle to stick to a consistent writing practice. Actually, that’s not really true. I do have a very consistent writing practice. It looks like me frantically trying to bang out a newsletter on Sunday, the day it is to be published, from start to finish, and then getting annoyed with myself for not putting more thought into it before I hit publish.

It’s highly consistent, because despite my attempts to change it, it’s what I end up doing 90% of the time. But somehow I don’t think it’s what is intended by the advice to develop a consistent writing practice.

I think the advice is really referring to the idea of writing every day, usually for a set amount of time, or a specific number of words, or some other set metric. It’s something I often strive for, put on my calendar, fully intend to do, and actually do maintain for at least a couple of weeks. And then, inevitably, I find myself putting it off, telling myself I need to get these other things done, and that I will get to writing tomorrow. And tomorrow I do the exact same thing, until eventually writing has left my list altogether. Until three, four, five, six months rolls around, and I go through the whole thing again.

Tell me you know what I’m talking about, and that it’s not just me. Please.

I suspect that many of you do actually know what I’m talking about, just as I also suspect that this resistance to prioritizing my writing might also have something to do with why I’ve been feeling stuck lately in a lot of areas in my life. It feels like I’ve been trying to push several rocks up a hill, and every time one of them gets some momentum going, the other rocks fall back down, and I have to go back to the bottom and collect all of them and start at the beginning again, and therefore I’m not making progress on any of them.

One might ask, as I’m sure you are, why I’m trying to push multiple rocks up a hill at the same time. Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on one rock at a time?

Yes. Yes it would. Nonetheless, this is where we found ourselves. I’ve given up on questioning the way my brain works, and instead am embracing acceptance. I will try to tackle multiple areas of my life at one time, probably for the same reason that I also read multiple books at one time, so let’s just focus on ways to do that more sustainably and with more self-compassion, shall we?

For the most part, I am able to do exactly that. But some days it just feels hard, and so the other day I was sharing about feeling discouraged in my subscriber chat. One of my subscribers, who is also a friend of mine, commented that when she is feeling discouraged, it usually means that she has abandoned herself in some way.

For months, I have been leaning more into fearful thought patterns, and away from love and my own intuition. I’ve been afraid of making the wrong move, or of what specific people will think. My focus has been on how long things were taking, why certain things haven’t happened yet, and what could potentially happen someday.

I’ve been distracted, and feeling lowkey stressed and resentful, without even realizing it was building in the background. It can happen so easily, all while leaving me uncertain as to why things aren’t unfolding the way I want.

Since realizing all this, I’ve been consciously trying to direct my thoughts more towards love, and onto the present moment that I’m actually in. When I do that, without the fearful thoughts running the show, I can notice what’s working and what isn’t more objectively, which then allows me to take positive action to change things. And suddenly, I’m back in flow. I’m writing a bit more, I’m resolving an issue at work, and I’m feeling more confident in general.

It’s not like things are perfect now, not by a long shot. But my friend was right, I was abandoning myself by turning away from my own inner guidance system. So of course things were feeling a little wonky, right? You can’t be in flow in your own life when you aren’t aligning with love. So I’m working on getting back into flow, and it feels a little like shaking the dust off my soul.

In case you are feeling stuck in any areas of your own life, here are some questions I used to help me figure out what was going on:

**Where have I been directing my thoughts lately?

**Where have I not been respecting my own boundaries (for example, around how you use your time or energy)?

**Have any old wounds been feeling triggered? What might they be needing from me?

**What has my intuition been whispering to me?

P.S. Next week I will be sharing my podcast interview with my friend Bree, a poet who published her first collection of poems last year, about discovering she’s gay, divorcing her husband, aligning with her own inner truth, finding true love in her new partner, and creating her dream life. She’s amazing, and her story is incredible. I’m so excited to share it!

P.P.S. After that week, I will step back a bit for summer, and only be posting one newsletter a month for June, July, and August. Be back with regular content in September!