For me, not writing things off as failures just because I didn’t stick with them has helped. I will pick back up with tactics that have failed over and over again, because eventually the doing of them will become habitual. There’s no real trick to it, it’s just that it takes a long, long time for behaviors to embed and become habits. I now have a fairly robust writing habit because I just keep writing as ideas come to me, even if they’re stupid or poorly formed or hard to translate into text, I’ll still find myself more inclined to sit down and scratch out a sentence or a paragraph or sometimes several paragraphs instead of just letting the thought slip by, and I think it’s because I keep doing it even though I don’t know that it’s “working” in that I don’t have any novels finished or even any stories that work as narrative fiction, just snippets and character workups and slice-of-life bits that may, one day, be a coherent story that people will be able to understand and want to read. I don’t even really enjoy writing, I find it tedious and difficult in a not-fun way. But I keep doing it because I want to be good at it and I like telling stories, and being a better writer helps me with that so I do find some joy in it, but the mechanical act of writing feels like brushing my teeth. I know it’s good for me, but I don’t especially enjoy it or even find it interesting most of the time.

I think there are a few different types of feelings that get lumped together into “wanting”, and I think it’s useful to disentangle them. I don’t “want” to write in the same way I want to smoke or watch TV or ride a roller coaster, but I do want to be a better writer in a different, less impulsive way, so I make myself write even though it feels kind of like brushing my teeth, or playing scales, or doing multiplication tables. It’s hard, often boring and rarely gratifying to look back at what I’ve written. But I want to be better at it so I just grit my teeth and do it anyway, and it does get easier to do the more you do it, in my experience.

And it is really hard. I have a ton of other, arguably more important things that I still haven’t been able to ingrain as a habit. To pick one because I’ve had it on my mind this morning: I have a really hard time being consistent with hygiene and skincare, even though I “want” to do it, I still go through periods where I neglect it and I haven’t found a consistent way to stay on that horse. I think the only thing to do is just to grit your teeth and start doing it again, knowing that it’s gonna suck for a while, and hoping that it might eventually suck less. And give yourself unlimited grace for failing. You can’t un-fail after failing, you can either try again or stop trying.