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The Villain in My Writing Life
Dispatch #5. What happens when you sabotage your own dream — and decide to fight back.
“Sometimes you are the villain in your own life story.”
This quote came up in a motivational YouTube video I was listening to and it really resonated with me. My fatal flaw is lack of consistency, as I’ve reported many a time here, and if a villain is someone who thwarts and sabotages the goals of the hero, then that is me. They’re both me.
Maybe you’ve felt this, too. Have there been times in your life where you get in a rut of laziness and distraction and come to a moment of clarity where you ask yourself, “What am I doing?”
There have legitimately been times where I could not write, during my father’s prolonged illness, his death, the period after where we sold the house. I’m not counting those moments against me. There were immediate and weighty concerns, but many other times I doom scrolled social media instead, ate a bag of chips while watching Dirty Harry, or simply napped. The villain strikes again.
The point of the video I was watching was that people get in their own way when it comes to their dreams. People give up too easy when it’s more challenging than they expected. Creators stop producing when people don’t consume their stuff after…
