Don’t Quit! We Love Your Stories
And we missed you.
I’ve been on Medium since April 2020. I was consistent for a while until I barely showed up for 2021.
Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance, with a capital R. It’s a negative, repelling force that prevents us from doing the work. It’s the self-sabotage, the fear, the procrastination, the self-doubt, the excuses, the criticism… the list is long.
It’s what stands in the way of our unlived life. (More on Pressfield’s Resistance soon.)
It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. — Steven Pressfield
Was I happy with not putting in the work — not writing? No, I wasn’t.
I decided to fight back and write in 2022, and I’ve been showing up more frequently this year.
Very recently, I was going through the list of writers that I follow and noticed tens of writers had stopped writing. It wasn’t just me; this was a trend.
Some writers had thousands of followers and were brilliant writers. How could they stop writing? What happened? Where did they go?
Then I came across this story by Rachel Bridgers and saw Maria Rattray’s comment — we all had noticed the same thing.
One example is Sabana Grande. Check him out. 5087 followers, prolific, witty, funny, fun, engaging… and just stopped writing. Where did he go? Why? What happened?
I find it hard to believe. It shouldn’t be this way. Good writers stick around — don’t they?
But that’s the issue. Even best-selling authors face Resistance every single day. It’s like fighting an addiction. You do it every day. We’re ok with it if WE quit, if WE make excuses, if WE don’t show up and write. But we’re not ok when our favorite authors or artists stop sharing their work.
Can you imagine a world where J. K. Rowling quit and never wrote Harry Potter? Or a world without Oprah, Stephen King, or your favorite artist? What if they had quit?
Sabana is just one example. There are tons of other writers who you probably missed. (Tag them here. I hope we can make a difference.)
I’m here to tell all these writers: We miss you. We love your writing. We want you back.
And if you don’t want to come back, I hope it’s because you’re doing what you love.