I Should Just Stop Saying “This is What I Want to Do!”

Because the minute I start doing the thing that I really want to do I end up losing all my inspiration.

Maybe I’m just meant to be on this planet to be a muse for everyone else. I’m like Salma Hayek’s character in Dogma. I can come up with a million ideas for everyone else but can’t seem to keep any for myself.

But does that mean I should just go be a stripper?

<insert hysterical laughter here>

Because, yeah, I’m sure that an almost 41 year old, pasty white and 25 pounds overweight woman with sagging boobs is exactly what all those drunk guys are looking for in a stripper. Then again, maybe they are…

Anyway, I’m not going that route but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around anything anymore. Not where my work is concerned anyway.

I’m planning and working toward launching a new venture later this summer that’s plucked right out of my writing experiences. There’s going to be a new book and I’m going to start formatting a coaching/mentoring program for self-publishing Authors so they can actually finish a book and bring it to market. The same basic gist of what my book is going to be about.

Sounds great right? I’m excited about it but every time I sit down to start populating my blog or getting some stuff together for guest posting opportunities that will help with my authority in this niche I literally go freaking blank.

It’s hard to pull out just a portion of the information I want to share with would-be Authors so I can get my posts going when I’m also going to need to create a small giveaway, then a book, then a coaching program all based around the same concept.

But the thing about today’s market is that if you have a product to sell you have to give away free informational shit first so people want to buy your even more informational stuff. Or at the least look forward to engaging with you about the content.

All the business owners in the world who have started something and run it successfully would say this is the part of the process where I need to push through, continue to try my best to get things going. Because this is the part where fear stops most other entrepreneurs in their tracks.

I want to be a successful business owner. I’ve wanted to be a successful business owner since I picked up my first package of Avon catalogues about 100 years ago and tried to sell makeup for a living.

Over the years after that I moved on to every other possible product that I could sell door-to-door – Tupperware, knives, memberships, and maybe more but I’m blanking now on what they all were. But I avoided selling the one thing I knew I really wanted to sell because I was so afraid that when I got there it would all end in a similar fashion and I’d have to admit defeat.

Of course I’m talking about books.

But I said screw it and wrote one anyway. The sense of accomplishment I felt after getting that first proof copy in the mail was like an enormous weight being lifted off my entire body. I felt like my efforts, all the odd jobs, the time I’d spent doing everything I didn’t really want, led me to the very thing I was born to do.

I got a plan together, finished it and put it out there.

And guess what happened when I finally lived my dream, wrote some books and tried to market them? Yeah. Epic fail.

But it had less to do with my writing (I hope) and a whole lot to do with my knowledge of marketing. I just can’t seem to break through that little wall in my brain that allows me to market appropriately. Hence the lack of inspiration now.

And so the merry-go-round spins. And I’m still on it, going around endlessly where I know I’m really good at what I do but struggling big time with how to get the rest of the world to see that while I’m moving in slow, measured circles that never get me closer to anything.

How am I going to coach other Authors if I can’t even do the stuff I plan to tell them to do?

I’m so sick of starting, going nowhere, stopping then starting over again. Especially when this is it. This is the thing. I’m done searching endlessly. I know what I want to do with my life. So why the fuck is it so difficult to just make it happen?

I get that whole bullshit cliché about nothing worth it will be easy but I’ve been working for this for what feels like forever now. Can’t I just get a little something for all the fucking effort I’ve been putting into being a full-time writer for the past 5 years? Can’t I just inspire myself for once and figure out how to make this work?

Because I can’t go back to working as a corporate drone. I can’t NOT be a writer now. But I need to make this a real business because I can’t stop eating or paying my bills either. I’m not afraid anymore. Not afraid of being successful.

So where the hell is the success? I’ve been asking for it for so many years now that I can’t help but think of a couple more clichés – quitters never win but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over expecting different results and never getting them.

Maybe I should just chuck it all and move into a tiny house with Matt in upstate NY, eat twigs and trap geese. Abandon the internet altogether and become a crazy shut-in lunatic who writes a 4000 page manifesto.

Of course, then I’m going to want to sell it…

A new window opens when you click to comment. Also, I get lots of spam comments so if the post is older than 3 days, your comment will be moderated.