Forgiving Yourself for A Change In Game Plan

When we’re teenagers we’re often encouraged to start thinking about our long term plans. At least by your early twenties you are setting up your path to take you to whatever profession you (or your parents) have planned. You take the steps you need to get there.

But sometimes years down the road you find that you actually don’t enjoy the thing that you thought you were going to love. The entire plan you made was for a life you assumed would be just right and isn’t feeling like what you want at all.

I’m finding that it’s hard to forgive myself for building my entire life towards something I thought was going to make me happy and actually doesn’t. Changing directions feels like admitting defeat. Not liking something that I thought should be perfect for me makes me feel guilty for all the choices I made along the way to make it happen.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure that fiction writing is the goal that I want to pursue anymore.

I decided when I was about thirteen that I needed to have a profession and a goal plan and so I picked novelist as my dream.

I focused completely on making a living from writing novels. I scraped by in classes that weren’t English. I went to a college that let me take only humanities classes. I practiced submitting to publishers. I worked on my masterpiece. Eventually I self-published that book, found a small but loyal audience, wrote a follow up. I got ideas for new books, wrote a lot of first drafts but years later I haven’t followed through on any of it. I have some novel drafts that I think could be great and yet they’ve been sitting in the same state for over a decade. I spend most days not writing and feeling tremendously guilty about it.

These days I don’t write books so much as I write blog posts.

It doesn’t alleviate the guilt that I feel for avoiding my fiction writing. I want to be able to let go of the idea of myself as a writer and let myself do whatever feels right at the time. Maybe sometimes that will involve writing books. But maybe it won’t. And that’s okay.

Or maybe I give up on things too easily. Give myself an out as soon as something makes me feel uncomfortable in any way. Maybe I’m too flighty and I’ll never be a success if I don’t learn to focus and dig into something.

I don’t know but I’m struggling with feeling like if I were to change directions, change focus, try something new that I’d be betraying my younger self and all of the years and effort that went into getting me what I thought I wanted.

Do we stick with something even if it isn’t bringing us the fulfillment we thought it would?