Under Pressure
I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, but in January 2026, I wrote a list of things I wanted to accomplish. There was no start date and no deadline. If I did none of them, no biggie. One of those things was “start writing more.” Writing has always been part of my life. As a teenager, I wrote a lot of fan fiction. Most of those stories lived in notebooks until (I’m going to age myself here) platforms like YahooGroups and LiveJournal became popular and sharing beyond the pages of the notebook that had the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium album cover on the front was as easy as hitting “post.” I had an independent study course in high school where I sat at a computer for 75 minutes and wrote what I recall being more glorified fan fiction. Was it any good? I couldn’t begin to tell you. In college, I majored in English Writing. I took the usual literature courses, creative writing courses, poetry writing courses (hated it), and playwriting courses (loved it), and somewhere along the way, whatever dream I had to become a best-selling author died. I think, by that point, the idea that I’d be so prolific and successful as a writer that it could be my only source of income had been beaten out of me.
The years after 2006 feel lost to me. I didn’t have a good sense of who I was in a period of life where everyone is supposed to find themselves. I had an old roommate who told me I was boring. I was offended at the time but given the benefit of nearly 20 years of retrospect, I can agree. I had no hobbies. Only a handful of friends. I didn’t go to parties. The music I listened to and the shows I watched were at the suggestion of someone else; not because I chose them. In the immortal words of Katy Perry, I did, in fact, feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind.
In April 2020, I was working full-time in addition to completing a full-time Master’s degree program while experiencing the collective trauma that was the COVID-19 pandemic. I was depressed as hell. I started therapy for the third time around then, which I’ve stuck to ever since (note: it’s usually a good idea to stick with therapy even when you start feeling better!). We talked a lot in the early days about self-compassion, perfectionism, and how my worth isn’t tied to what I produce. I can just do shit. I don’t need permission or validation. When I finally started to trust myself again, I became a bit of a serial hobbyist. I’d decide I was into Thing, buy all the supplies for Thing, do Thing for a few weeks or a month, and move on to another Thing. Then I’d feel guilty for not sticking with Last Thing. This did not make me special, first of all, and as my therapist likes to remind me, so what? I can have a new hobby every day and it hurts no one. Except, perhaps, my bank account. Anyway, how do you know what you like until you try it? I won’t go into all of the hobbies I tried and discarded or tried and stuck to, but this period I spent filling myself up again so I was no longer an empty husk of a human is important context.
Back to the list. I had two bullets on the list related to writing. One was the above-mentioned “start writing more.” The other was “commit to journaling.” One tool I’ve found helpful for managing anxiety is the brain dump: write down everything weighing on you just to get it out of your head. Burn it, give it to the universe, whatever. Just get it out. This eventually turned into daily journaling. More specifically, the morning pages exercise from The Artist’s Way (which I failed miserably at completing but — say it with me now — so what?). First thing every morning, write three pages in your journal. The words don’t have to make sense. Don’t read back the entries. The lack of constraints, minus the page count, was beautifully freeing. Previous attempts at daily journaling for any length of time failed because I thought I had to be profound and learn something new about myself or the world with every entry. It’s an enormous amount of pressure that doesn’t exist. Now I’m less than 10 pages away from starting my 5th journal of the year.
In therapy, I talk a lot about doors. Some doors are to be kept closed and some I want to throw open and scare the thing waiting behind it before it scares me. Journaling finally opened a door that had been closed to me for so long the hinges were rusting off: writing stories again. I wrote a short one just to prove to myself that I could. I spent a long weekend with my eldest brother in Florida at the end of March. I finished the first draft of Too Many Ghosts Here a few days before my 39th birthday in May. I spent the summer revising the manuscript through four more drafts and submitted my first agent query in September. Now, I know that authors rarely get to publish their first books through traditional means and I’m fully prepared to get a “no” from every single agent I query because that’s just kind of the way things work in the industry. Being an indie author isn’t off the table for me. One way or the other, you’ll get to read Too Many Ghosts Here, and I hope you love it as much as I do.
Here’s your takeaway for this inaugural blog entry: JUST GO DO SHIT.
Rachel