When I Forgot Why I Was Writing

How I rediscovered motivation

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I’m late with this post.  I have lots of very good reasons, one of which is that Charles and I got Covid shortly after I published my last post.  And my son got the job of his dreams and is moving to Florida, so I went to Michigan to take care of their dog and cats while he and his wife went house-hunting. 

But the real reason, I suspect, is that I was plagued with doubts about what to write.  I knew I wanted to introduce the idea of ecosystem motivation, but I wasn’t sure how. 

I care deeply about this idea. I've spent years studying it, yet I hesitated to write about it. I worried about oversimplifying it, being misunderstood, or sounding like someone who had mastered something I'm still learning myself.

The more I tried to write, the more self-conscious I became. I worried that readers would misunderstand me, that other academics would criticize me, and that after writing so personally about my own life, I had already made myself too vulnerable.

So, day after day, I sat in a swirl of confusion about what to write, whether what I wrote was any good, whether people would find it boring, and at times, whether I even wanted to continue with writing my Substack.  I decided to give myself a break from what was becoming a source of stress instead of a source of meaning and purpose.

Then my friend Cody came over.  He helped me put new plantings in the garden on my patio, then we had dinner.  When I shared my tardiness and confusion about this post, he reminded me that one of the people I’m writing for is him.  He’s been through a lot in his life, including a recent breakup.  He reads my posts for nuggets that can help him be who he wants to be, live the life he wants to live. He is eager to grow.  He isn’t interested in critiquing or judging me.

It reminded me why I had started writing in the first place. I'm not writing for other academics. I'm writing for people like Cody—people looking for ideas, grounded in research, that might help them navigate their own lives. After my cancer diagnosis, I promised myself that if I'd learned something worth sharing, I would share it.

After a few more days of letting the ideas percolate, I found that I wanted to get back to writing.  I want to share what I’ve learned in case Cody, or someone else, finds it helpful. 

Last Tuesday I gave a talk to some students at Lakeside High School about my work on egosystem and ecosystem motivation.  They seemed to find it interesting and helpful.  I shared personal stories—revealing stories that haven’t appeared in my Substack--and I was fine with being vulnerable.  The experience encouraged me to continue writing.

Then I realized that this is what I had been wanting to write about for the past four weeks. I had shifted from egosystem motivation—being driven by fears about what other people would think of me and my writing—to a different source of motivation, one focused on what I wanted to give and create. I wanted to share what I'd learned. Once I was clear about that, my fears didn't disappear. They simply stopped being in charge.