How to Transition from One Writing Project to the Next [or] Thirty-seven Spokes on the Wheel of Samsara

1. Finish the book you’ve been writing for several years now. Feel satisfaction. Feel pride. Feel relief. Reward yourself with food. You’re off the hook for awhile, and you earned it.
2. Enter a phase of depression. You have lost something, and it’s harder to get up in the morning.
3. Enter a phase of self-doubt. Now that you have the gift of perspective, brainstorm all the ways you failed. Your project lacks a through line, for example. The tone isn’t consistent. When your sister’s brother-in-law asked you (in all earnestness) what the point of it was, you didn’t have an answer.  
4. Feel guilty that you haven’t started writing again. Flay yourself for your lack of commitment to Art. Get angry with yourself, but not angry enough to do anything about it.
5. Realize, in a moment of clarity, that maybe you’re not a writer. You’re not, for example, Mary Oliver. As a child, you didn’t relish words so much as stories. You cared about movement (roller skating, riding your bike down the big hill, doing cartwheels, playing kickball). You cared about making your bedroom—and your sisters’ bedrooms, and the living room, and motel rooms, and gas station bathrooms, and all the spaces you spent time in—clean and welcoming. You liked to draw. You wrote two poems when you were 10, one about crucifixion and one about spring, mostly to impress your father, who valued poems at the time. Your poems made you feel like a child. You were a child, but you’d forgotten that until you wrote those poems. Writing poems feels the same today: like you’re imposing yourself on words that would rather have been left alone.
6. Embark on an intense foray into spirituality. Focus particularly on learning about energy and trying to energetically heal your anxiety, restlessness, and lack of motivation. Try to heal other people, too. Tell yourself that maybe healing is your true calling.
7. Join a Psychic Circle and practice reading people’s minds. Tell yourself that maybe psychic work is your true calling.  
8. Grow discouraged and angry when the healing, manifestation, and psychic practice work only briefly and inconsistently. Enter a slump.
9. Feel ill at ease in your body. Wonder if you might have cancer of the brain, breast, skin, thyroid, leg. Wonder if a small rock has somehow grown beneath the skin of your right knee. Notice how far your gums are receding. Are they afraid of something? Read the Medical Medium and decide you have Epstein-Barr Virus. EBV explains everything. It explains the mood swings, the anxiety, the anger. It explains why you’re still not writing.
10. Rally yourself! Complete transformation is just a relatively short-term strict diet away. Embark on the Medical Medium’s Cleanse: a 28-day diet of fresh fruits and vegetables—no oils, nuts, grains, spices, salt, etc. Feel your powers growing.
11. Stop the diet on day 15. Tell yourself it’s okay. Tell yourself you’re not a failure—you’re just being realistic. Salad without dressing tastes like punishment, and who are these men of health, anyway, posturing as prophets? Why do you give them such authority? Offer them a compromise: tell them you’ll eat “clean” one week every month, or one day every week. Surely you can handle that.  
12. You can’t handle it. Enter a slump.
13. Rally yourself. Determine you can at least read poetry and literature even if you’re not writing it. Buy a bunch of poetry books (you gave most of your old poetry books away last year, during another transition, because they didn’t “spark joy”) and let them sit unread while you return to your favorite, Mary Oliver. Mary Oliver sparks joy. Let Mary Oliver inspire you.
14. It worked! Mary Oliver has inspired you. Decide to forget about critics and write for yourself. Writing for yourself means using only your daily experiences as material. It means not trying to show off or make the boys like you. This kind of writing is what you’ve needed all along, a pure exploration of the materials of this world.
15. Proceed to write a series of terrible poems. Hate yourself for not being Mary Oliver. Hate Mary Oliver, just a little bit, for being so Mary Oliver.  
16. Suspect that you could be Mary Oliver if you wrote every day, spent more time outdoors, and stopped indulging in television, trash novels, and sugar. Feel despair.
17. Enter a slump.
18. Start taking voice lessons. You can’t sing and slump at the same time.
19. Renew your commitment to meditation. Meditate hard.
20. Renew your commitment to yoga. Yoga has clear outcomes. You know, for example, when you’ve mastered crow or cobra bows or elbow stands.
21. Feel inspiration growing. Determine to embark on a life of discipline and commitment. Choose your commitment trifecta: yoga, writing, singing (all supported by daily meditation). Get up early so you can fit everything in—meditation, yoga, writing, music—and still have time for dog, husband, stepkids, house, yard, meals, etc.
22. Write a bunch of blog posts about your newly committed life, your purpose-driven life, as some might call it. 
23. Feel GREAT about yourself. Look at you, being a serious person!
24. After a week of this, when it no longer feels great, when it feels like you’re living in some other person’s wet dream, the person whose voice you’ve heard in your head your whole life but who might not, it turns out, be you or have your best interests at heart—after a week of having completely exhausted yourself, realize that you’ve been so busy doing yoga and singing and writing and meditating that you don’t have time to do yoga, sing, write, or meditate. Realize that you have made of your life what C.A. Conrad calls a “factory-like structure.” Realize that discipline begets discipline. It doesn’t necessarily beget anything else.
25. (Then again, it’s only been a week.)
26. Become aware that your diatribe against “factory-like structures” is probably just a way to deny your inability to handle a serious life.
27. Become mesmerized by the coffee mug on your husband’s dresser. Wonder if it’s okay to just look at it without having to come up with words for it.
28. Wonder if you should recommit yourself to the practice of lucid dreaming.
29. Wonder what it would feel like to pick just one thing. To only write. Dismiss the idea quickly as completely counter to your nature and the nature of writing. The nature of writing (or of you, or both) is that it makes you want to distract yourself from it with things like yoga and lucid dreaming.
30. Wonder if you should forget everything and meditate all day.
31. Wonder where you got this idea of daily-ness—of something having to happen every single goddamned day for it to move forward. Oh, wait. You remember. You got it from writers giving keynote speeches at writing conferences. You got it from Nike commercials. You got it from self-help books. If you can be on Facebook every day, you can write every day!
32. Wonder if you should take up running again. Wasn’t running great?
33. Wonder if writing blog posts about yourself and your small, cyclical dramas is a way of keeping yourself down, of being a weird kind of codependent therapist/spouse/parent to yourself, constantly miccromanaging your mood. Wonder if you’re capable of writing BIG, and if not, should you be writing at all? Realize that this question is both a symptom of chauvinistic writing culture and also legitimate.
34. Notice how uneasy you feel when left alone with time. How you skulk around time’s edges, watching for how and when it will blindside you with either guilt or panic. Wonder what it would be like to live as if you were immortal—a vampire or a god. What’s to stop you from living that way now?
35. Is what the self-righteous advice-givers would say. And just what do those advice-givers mean when they say (perhaps because they’ve had it up to here with you), “All you have to do is be happy.” Do they mean happy in this moment or happy in the long run? Do they mean bliss or general good cheer or melancholic content ? Do they mean a cow chewing cud or a hawk scanning for prey or wild horses running free? What evidence would make them believe you’re as happy as they think you should be?
36. Wonder how much you’ll regret, on your deathbed, that you didn’t delve more deeply into your Self, explore the limits of your ability and creativity, find your edges (or find, if what everyone nowadays says is true, that you have no limits, that you’re practically a superhero). Will you regret that you let small things distract you, like wiping off the sink, walking the dog, finding the perfect diet, or stopping every two minutes to wonder if you’re doing the right thing?
37. Wonder about where you would be now if you had stayed committed to any of the things you’ve wanted to be good at. By now, you’d be an accomplished yogi, writer, lucid dreamer, psychic, healer, poet, runner, piano player, singer, meditator, spiritual guide, tap dancer, and Tarot reader. You’d have a PhD in Literature. You’d have a PhD in Psychology. You’d have at least a BA in Math, just to prove you could do it. You’d have the colon, liver, heart, and skin of a newborn child.