Lately I’ve been catching up on the Writing Excuses podcast, since it has so much information on the writing process and general writing advice. The more I listen to it, though, the more anxious I become at how vastly superior those authors are to me. I used to be all sort of secure about how I write five hundred words every day without fail, but these guys spend hours upon hours writing every day, meaning their output is vastly greater than mine.

It inspired me, in a very small sense, to get up and do something, but then I hit the brick wall that’s always been in my path, though I forget it exists sometimes. That wall is the fact that my universe isn’t developed enough to have an entire book written out of it. Most specifically, the magic system doesn’t work yet. But at the same time if I were to change it, it could change my entire universe, and I’m not sure whether I even want to do that.

The second approach would simply be to write in a different universe. I do have some inklings, but I don’t have anything cool enough to even peak my interest, so I’ve come to an impasse.

So last night I was sort of freaking out, having an existential crisis about who I really should be trying to be, and in the end, I just decided to go to sleep. Here’s the cool thing about sleep. Sleeping is the equivalent of “turning it off and back on again” when something isn’t working properly. I feel a lot better simply because time has passed and I’ve taken the time to rest. I’m not entirely stable, so to speak, but I’m no longer worried about my life.

I think life has a way of getting to us regardless of when and where we are, but most of the time, the thing that we need is simply to relax. I’ve heard that when you’re incredibly angry at somebody for whatever reason (say, a SO cheated on you, a friend broke something dear to you, etc.) the best course of action is to write about a page of everything you want to say, then go to sleep without doing anything with it. When you wake up, you can read it over again, make edits if you need to, then send it. More often than not, you won’t send it to them, because a lot of the things you will have said will have been spoken in anger.

Sleeping is a rejuvenating process that can heal a lot of things, both physically and mentally. When coming to a crossroads in your life, sometimes it’s impossible to say which option to choose until you sleep on it. I’ve come to important decisions quite a few times, laying in bed thinking back and forth over the pros and cons, but when I wake up, often I know in my heart which one is the right decision.

So if you’re having trouble with something, sometimes you should just relax and sleep on it. You can probably sort out the issue subconsciously, because sometimes that problem needs to be organized through different areas of your brain.