 Hello my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. In this video I wanted to touch on something that I've observed about myself and no one has said this to me yet but I've seen people make these types of comments to other writers and that is why do you do it if you complain so much about it? And the reason I started thinking about this in relation to me is that pretty much all of these writing ramble videos are me complaining about something I can't do or can't figure out and a lot of my recent project reciprocal stalking was me complaining about not being able to figure it out and that got me thinking I have been spending so much time complaining about writing and the writing process why don't I stop? Wouldn't it be easier if I just wasn't writing at all and then I wouldn't be complaining at all in theory? And for me at least the truth is no that even though I have been complaining a lot about writing stopping wouldn't make me happier and I think an accurate comparison would be comparing writing to the gym so with the exception of the coronavirus shutdown I've been going to the gym regularly since October 2018 and sometimes I love it like sometimes I get there I'm really enthusiastic have a good workout I get my sweat on it's awesome. That's not most of the time though like most of the time I'm ambivalent sometimes I really don't want to go but I go anyway and the reason for that is because it makes me feel better. I might not feel good going into the gym but I feel good having gone to the gym and as a whole going to the gym and getting in better shape has made my life better. It has made my mood better it means I get less back pain. I feel a sense of pride in the fact that I've been going regularly for what is a fairly long time for me. I feel a sense of pride in the fact that even though they're all still all covered under a layer of fat I do have muscles there and I can flex them and people can feel them. I get excited when I'm able to hit new milestones and lift heavier things or when I'm able to do a move that I couldn't do before like if I get a push-up from the feet rather than from my knees or one day if I'm ever able to get an unassisted pull-up that's going to feel really good and writing similar. I've spent a lot of my adult life being really unsatisfied and frustrated and searching for my path and searching for the career that would fulfill me or the country or the city that would fulfill me the perfect balance of where I was living and what I was doing that would make me happy and that included working for I don't even know how many companies off the top of my head but working for a lot of companies and starting my own business and Tallinn is now the fourth city I've lived and worked in and ultimately wherever I went I was still there and I would get distracted by the bright new shiny thing for three months and then I would start getting frustrated and I have itchy feet again and I'd want to look for something else and over the past few years I have thought about getting back into writing and I did a little bit in 2017 like a month or two or three maybe and then fell out of it and didn't really pick it up again until mid 2019 and what I noticed was that from mid 2019 once I started writing regularly again even if the projects weren't going well the fact that I was writing made everything else better so when I was writing I was less frustrated at work I was happier in my life in general I didn't feel like I needed to run somewhere else in order to find fulfillment and that was true whether I went into a session really enthusiastic eager to get started and went really well or whether I was feeling ambivalent towards getting into a writing session but I did it anyway or whether I was feeling really enthusiastic but made myself do it the fact that I was writing and writing regularly made my life better even if I was complaining about it now admittedly that hasn't quite been the same this year and I think that's due to a number of things including not giving myself downtime between projects so I could continue to work on my writing in a sustainable way again and choosing a difficult project that made it really hard to set up a regular routine because I wasn't getting anywhere and going for a new job which took up a lot of my time and energy and meant that I didn't have the capacity to write as well but as a general rule I know that writing makes my life better and that's why even though I might seem like I complain a lot and even though I might be struggling to figure out how to write and how to write well I still want to do it and admittedly maybe I could stop complaining and I think that is something I'm going to work on but I just thought this little reflection was useful and I wanted to share it with you and if you're in this position where there's something you're doing that you've got a lot of negative commentary happening around it have a think about why you're really doing it and even though you complain is it something that makes your life better or is it something that doesn't make your life better in which case is it worth letting it go so I'd love to hear from you please let me know in the comments what your relationship with writing is like and whether you have a similar I guess love hate relationship with it like I do or whether things are a bit smoother for you or maybe you're just more experienced and you've gotten through these initial growing pains so please let me know if you like this video please give me a like to keep the gods of youtube happy and I will see you next time bye