Several years ago I used to edit a neighborhood magazine. Every month, I would write an editor’s note to open the issue. If you’ve ever read the editor’s note of any publication, you’ll see they’re usually some variation of a personal story or reflection tying into that month’s featured theme. I loved writing the reflections, but often forgot to tie them into anything relevant for the magazine. And that’s OK.

I’ve moved onto other writing roles I enjoy, but the editor’s note is something I’ve always missed. It was a dedicated time to sit down, gather up all the recent encounters and musings floating around in my brain, and organize them into something coherent on the page. Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.” For me, for Joan, for a lot of us…writing is thinking.

So I’ll be doing my “thinking” here, on this page, starting now. I actually decided this a year ago, but Resistance did what she does to everyone attempting to put something new into the world. She cupped my face in her hands, looked deeply into my eyes and said so sweetly, “Nobody cares what you have to say, Caroline.”

She’s kinda nasty, right? Do you let her speak to you like this? She has a lot of opinions about my time, credibility, originality, priorities, and general worth as a human. Someone wrote an entire book about her and the ways she works called The War of Art, and it’s worth reading if her (nasty) voice has a familiar ring.

The short version is simply this: there is a force—a dreadfully strong one—whose business is to paralyze us with self-doubt and keep us from doing the things we want/need to do. It’s called Resistance and every person has to overcome it to put something out into the world. The more important The Something is to your soul, the harder it works to hold you back. Me? I wanted to start sharing stories on the internet about my own experiences and the questions those bring up. It took me a year to overcome Resistance in this particular area, and I did it by creating an outline of topics I want to write about and asking a few friends to hold me to it. Because, at the end of the day, I think it’ll be good for my soul—as the things we want to do often are.

This is the question I’ve been considering, and will consider over and over (and over and over) again:

Where am I feeling Resistance, and what’s my move to overcome it?