I have an unfortunate aversion to any sort of schedule. I know this, and I have known this for as long as I’ve ever been forced to follow a schedule. Whether related to soccer practice or taking vitamins, daily tasks and chores have never been my strong suit. I hate procrastinating, but it’s one of the things that I am best at doing. 

With this in mind, I assumed that I would absolutely despise having a daily writing assignment. When our teacher told us that we were going to start a practice of open ended, unprompted writing every day, I was ninety-nine percent sure that I would end up staring at an empty google doc, void of ideas. To be sure, the first ten minutes of working on it went exactly as I assumed. I twiddled my thumbs a bit, buried my phone underneath a pile of clothes, and cursed my past self for deciding that I wanted to pursue a career in writing. Yet, miraculously, this exhausting process did not continue into the wee hours of the morning. Despite my near-certain expectation that any creative inspiration would evade me, I found myself only waiting for about ten minutes. I was not writing my best work, nor was I writing anything with a point to it, but I ended up enjoying myself immensely. At first, I had been frustrated because I was stuck with the idea that everything I wrote had to be the best piece of literature known to humankind. Once I got over that idea, and started writing whatever I wanted, I had a lovely time. While I only started writing anything I wanted to spite myself, it ended up working out to my benefit. I think that one of the hardest cycles of thinking to break out of as a relatively young writer is the idea that everything I write has to be revolutionary. Many times, I’ve turned up my nose at my own writing because I see it as immature, overdramatic, or something stupidly high-school level. I get irritated when I don’t write about philosophical or mind blowing topics, but at the same time if I do try to write about something “important” enough, I get depressed at my inability to articulate what I want. I realized that this was also why I aggressively procrastinate so much. I’ve fallen into a trap of believing that if I do an average job at the last minute, I’m proving that I could have done insanely good if I’d had more time. I purposely don’t do my best because I’m afraid of what my limit is. While it definitely was an annoying lesson to learn, having a daily writing assignment emphasized to me the importance of letting yourself write terrible stories.