Welcome to day 21 of my experiment: Going through the Valley of Despair.
Today, my experiment of writing every day for 21 days comes to an end. And although it was exactly the challenge I needed to confront procrastination, perfectionism, and self-sabotage, it also laid bare what is truly required to achieve mastery.
The distance between what I imagine and my reality is still wide.
In my mind, I wanted to sit down, start writing with ease everything that came to me, set a timer, finish the text in thirty minutes, and edit, format, and publish it within an hour and a half. Today, that would be mastery to me.
But there is still friction. Friction in sitting down to write, structuring ideas, editing, formatting, and publishing. Everything always takes much longer than I imagine it will. I still haven’t found a way of writing that I feel satisfied with. It feels as though everything I write lacks the clarity I believed I had. At this point, physical effort feels easier than mental effort for me.
The end of this experiment does not mean the end of crossing the valley of despair. It was only a lever — like a moving walkway in the middle of an airport. I moved through it faster, but I am still in it. I know this by the way I feel: there is still a great deal of effort required. And this is precisely why so many people give up here — because they see discomfort as an impediment, rather than as something indispensable.
The good part is that this experiment gave me back a sense of movement and progress. I wanted to end the year with more than one hundred posts published — and that, I achieved.
The path remains the same; what has been renewed is my willingness to keep walking even without seeing it in full. As I said in yesterday’s post, I stopped demanding clarity as a condition to continue. I choose to keep going even when it doesn’t look elegant, efficient, or inspiring. I choose to sustain the process even when it is slow, uncomfortable, and mentally exhausting.
I don’t know if there is a right way to cross the valley. But this will be mine. I don’t expect to see its end any time soon. In my own way, I am learning how to walk through it.
With determination,
