You Do You, Boo (A Discussion About Internal Motivation)

Last year, I did a small series of blog posts in which I discussed the variety of ways to motivate yourself externally. It was a nice little series. I enjoyed writing it. But what happens when all those frills stop working?

Remember....who....you are....

(Inserting gifs in here because it's 2016 and that's the Thing To Do.)

The most common advice I hear from anyone, in terms of work and career, is to do what you love. A no-brainer, right? It would seem so; hell, I preach that advice every day. But what happens when you don't even know what that means anymore? What happens when you sit down one day, doing The Thing You Love, only to start thinking that you maybe don't love it as much as you thought?

You have a freak out, for starters. You start to panic a bit. You start to question whether you're on the right path, whether this thing truly is The Thing You Love. Then you bury your troubles under hours and hours of Sims and try not to think about it.

(Not like I would know or anything....)

What makes something The Thing You Love? What magical quality does it posess that allows it to turn from just a hobby into...more? It's not an easy thing to pinpoint, really, because there's not just one way for it to get to that point. We all live different lives, we all choose to put our passion in different things for different reasons. There's no road map to figure out what The Thing You Love should really be. 

All you can really do...is do you. You do you, boo!

I don't know when I started saying this. Probably as a joke, to be honest--something to say indifferently, as a go-ahead to a suggestion, when the process doesn't affect the outcome, or the outcome doesn't affect me at all. "Go for it--you do you, Boo."

Then, last month, a friend of mine uploaded a post on her own blog, and made reference to this saying that I've suddenly adopted as my own. All at once, I realized that this saying wasn't really a joke at all--it had become advice. Real advice. Good advice, that I had never really thought to follow.

I started writing when I was around nine. It's been a part of my life for a very long time, and for all that time I never struggled with my future life plans. I wanted to do this, I was working hard for it, and I knew I was good. (Most of the time, anyway.) I always knew what I wanted to do...until suddenly, I didn't. (Y'all already know that story; it eventually lead to the creation of this blog.)

I joke about procrastination a lot. I've always done it, but over time it's gotten worse. Shouldn't this be easy? Shouldn't I have enough passion to push myself out of whatever rut I find myself in and just do it?

It wasn't that I didn't want to. I did. It's that I was lacking the energy, the time, the motivation. Every time I felt that rush, that flurry of words that poured out of me, I grabbed it desperately. I didn't want to let it go, to drift back into the void of other people's stories, all of which were starting to do nothing but remind me that mine wasn't out there.

But every time, I let go. I had to, because of responsibilities and commitments and a zillion other things that I wanted nothing to do with. I started to resent my job because of it, because I felt that every moment not spent towards The Thing I Loved was just a waste of time. I threw every creative project that wouldn't bring me a step closer to publication under the rug. 

Eventually, I threw The Thing I Loved under the rug, too. I didn't think I could do it anymore--every time I sat down to start, I got too distracted with other things. I got too frustrated with the fact that I wasn't anywhere near where I wanted to be at this point in my life--and I felt like a failure.

I stopped blogging because of it--for months.

Here's something that not everybody tells you: you're not always going to love The Thing You Love. You're not always going to love your dream job. No matter what it is, there are going to be days when you want absolutely nothing to do with it. There are going to be days when you want to do literally anything else, anything to avoid The Thing You Love. But that doesn't mean you just give it up--it doesn't mean that you've lost it, it doesn't mean that you need to throw in the towel and start looking for another way to occupy your time. That's why I wrote those initial posts, why I spent so long focusing on external motivators--because in dire times, they can save your ass. You need every ounce of inspiration you can muster.

But if you don't have the internal motivation to back it up, you're not going to get very far.

I don't know much, but this is what I do know: I love creating things. I love telling stories. I love pouring my heart and soul into something, and turning it into an experience for someone else. I love that. I always will, even sometimes I wish I could skip the hard part and skip straight to holding the finished product in my hands. The passion remains, through all the procrastination.

All you have to do is start. That's how you figure it out. You push past the hard bit, you grab hold of every ounce of motivation you can, and you use it to fuel the launch.

Because once you reach the stars, there's nothing holding you back.

You do you, guys.

- Justyne