What do you write about when you don't know what to write about?! 'Write about that,' is what I can hear my internal therapist configuration telling me. Euff! Okay.

I think I might have set myself up to fail, creating too tight a limit about what I write about on this blog and setting myself too much of an expectation about it always being amazing and meaningful. I have done that without even realising. It means I have backed myself into a corner of perfectionism and set myself up for failure which I try to avoid. My initial aim was to set up a writing habit, practice and - hopefully - improve my writing skills. Thinking so narrowly about what I would include in the writing has rendered me speechless. 

Simply, this is not how my brain works. 

There is a familiar metaphor coming to mind, about taking a helicopter position to see the bigger picture. I do that in other aspects of my work too but frequently have to come in close enough to look through a window in one of the houses below. This is how I make meaning and work out relevance. Rather than thinking of myself like a helicopter pilot, I guess I am more like a drone operator. Over the last couple of weeks, with the tight parameters I set on my writing, it's like I have taken the batteries out of my drone and still expected it to fly. I have left myself hovering in a middle space, not knowing where to look or what to look at. 

Bizarrely, I know I am writing about this making links to where I am in my research process. But whereas I have known before that I can get stuck in the sky or/and in the minutiae, I haven't thought about being stuck in the in-between. Hmm. Haven't I? 

All those places could be anxiety provoking as I don't like being stuck anywhere. (Who does?) So how have I tried to avoid that anxiety? (I know that's what I can have a tendency to do.) In the last two weeks I have kept myself busy - too busy? I have not let myself feel the discomfort, using procrastination techniques that are becoming increasingly familiar. When I have been reading research papers, I have been pulled to old topics, reluctant to focus on something unknown because the potential direction of my research scares me a little. Aah, there it is. 

I think this exercise in writing when I don't know what to write about has been a valuable exercise. And the takeaways? It's time to let myself focus on and work through the anticipation of the work to come. It's time to free myself up, to trust myself and resist the urge to overly control situations. Wish me luck.