Tinkering, more than writing

The purpose of this blog or this website is to be an outlet for my “itch” of writing. But more than writing, what I do is tinker with the website. I haven’t written anything in years, but hardly a day goes by when I haven’t changed or updated the code of the site in the backend. Take a look at my GitHub contributions page—I keep building things and tinkering with things that I have built.

If only I were this consistent with my writing. Because the sole purpose of this personal blog is to express myself.

And surprisingly, I’m not the only one who suffers from this weird syndrome. I have visited countless personal blogs that are as abandoned and sporadic as mine. There are countless people who would want to create something, but they never do. It’s not as if they don’t have that desire to create, which I keep calling "itch."

Steven Pressfield, in his book “War of Art," addresses this issue. He personifies this and calls it the Resistance. Resistance is the obstacle between you and your creative pursuits. Below is a quote from his book.

"Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole. Resistance is protean. It will assume any form, if that's what it takes to deceive you. It will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face like a stickup man. Resistance has no conscience." — Steven Pressfield

And I would agree with that. I feel this invisible enemy who stops me from writing. That invisible enemy makes me tweak, design, and re-design my blog endlessly instead of writing a 100-word article.

Pressfield further states that Resistance is not an external enemy; it’s an enemy within.

I have read this book three times. The last I read it was yesterday. I wrote yesterday, and I’m writing today. It doesn’t have a magic pill. The solution that Pressfield gave can be summed up by the quote below—

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”— Steven Pressfield

So yeah, just sit down and work. That’s it.

Most of the time, you don’t need a magic pill. You just need to be reminded that you are not the only one struggling. You are never going to feel ready. You are the problem, and you are also the solution.