Afraid of the Stream of Consciousness

I don't know why I deny myself the things I most love. But I can't be the only one who does this. 

One strange example is related to my astrological sign. I am a Cancer, a water sign. And although I love the earthy woods, I do definitely feel a draw to all things flowing water. As a young child I could take baths that lasted over an hour, staying in the water until I was pickled and pruned. But I almost never take long baths anymore. The sound of rain on my roof makes me anxious because of my OCD. And I miss the ocean. I so utterly miss the ocean. The ocean of the Oregon coast is where I feel most alive and most magical...where the freshwater rivers meet the raging sea, where forests suddenly stop at rocky cliffs overlooking the surging waves. 

What brought all of this to mind was doing some navel gazing about my creative pursuits. We've become a society so based on instant gratification that I have found myself neglecting my favorite creative passion simply because it's the one that has the slowest payoff for anyone who might be following what I do. And that of course is my creative writing. It's the one thing I've most wanted to pursue, refine, improve, and leave as a legacy, but it's the one creative pursuit I do least often. And I really want to change that. 

But it's so difficult when you know, or hope at least, that there are people out there following and interested in what you do, and writing takes time away from trips to the woods and quick little aesthetic videos in costumes on Tiktok, (I'm on Tiktok now, btw) and doing artworks you can finish in a couple of days and then share with everyone. When you feel like they're used to seeing that sort of thing from you, and instead it's weeks of silence as you pour over things like word choice and plot and first and last sentences and and and....

But y'all...there will always be reasons and excuses for me not to buckle down and actually try to make something of my writing life. The fact of the matter is that I'm scared. Scared that I'll never improve to the point of publication. That my stories will never be good enough. That I'll never be able to come up with enough *full* stories. I've always been decent at expository / journalistic writing...blogs, articles, etc. I've always enjoyed doing small snippets of creative writing as well..little cut scenes from a longer tale, sort of like the photos I like to model for (a caught moment in a larger story you want to know). But when it comes time to write an actual story from start to finish, I struggle. 

Having said that, I do already have some story ideas in the queue that have been sitting there collecting dust for a few years now, while I accumulate a pile of Instagram posts and videos (don't get me wrong, I love doing those, I just think my priorities might not be straight). 

I just worry everyone will forget about me if I have to disappear for a little while to write a story that I may or may not ever find a home for, and that I can't share while I'm shopping it around at different magazines and journals. 

So, yeah. This has been a rather stream of consciousness blog post. I hope you don't mind. I feel like I haven't been posting here as often as I'd like to either, because I keep waiting for ideas that can be perfectly and beautifully executed. But I'd like to post here more often no matter what, because this is my space, and I want to inhabit it, if that makes sense? Not just wait for the "big" ideas to come to fruition. 

So talk to me. Do you struggle with denying yourself the things you love most? Do you struggle with worrying that if you work on an artistic project that takes a lot of time that people might forget about you or move on? And if so, how do you get past that?