The 30-Week Gap: Why I Stopped Writing and Started Again

I went looking through this blog the other day and found a gap I did not want to see. The last post before this one was thirty weeks old. Not a pause I announced. Not a break I decided on. I just stopped, and then a month went by, and then the month became a season.

I want to write down what actually happened, because I think the reason is boring and common and worth saying out loud.

It Was Not One Big Thing

The honest answer is that there was no single week where I decided to stop. That is not how it works. It works like this: one week you are busy, so you skip it, and skipping once feels fine because you will do it next week. Next week you are busy too, and now you are also slightly behind, and being behind makes the thing you skipped feel bigger than it is.

Then you have skipped five weeks and now writing a post means acknowledging the five weeks, and that is a worse feeling than writing a post. So you skip again. That is the whole mechanism. It is not laziness. It is the tax that builds up on the thing you did not do.

What Was Actually Happening While I Was Not Writing

This is the part that makes me less annoyed at myself. I was not sitting still. I was working the bowling alley, raising kids, getting the freeze-dry operation off the ground, and starting a coffee company in the gaps. The blog went quiet because the rest of it got loud.

Which is a real trade and I am not going to pretend it was free. The blog is how people find us. It is also how I keep track of what a year actually looked like, and thirty weeks of it are just gone from the record now. Not from my life. From the record.

Why I Am Starting Again Instead of Catching Up

I thought about writing thirty posts to backfill the gap. I decided not to, and I want to say why.

Backfilling would mean writing about things I have already half forgotten, in a voice I would be inventing after the fact. That is not a record. That is a reconstruction, and it would read like one.

So I am not catching up. I am starting from here, and I am going to be honest in the record that there is a hole in it. That feels worse than a tidy archive and better than a fake one.

The Thing I Actually Learned

Here is what thirty weeks of silence taught me, and it is the same lesson as the pantry, which is why I am writing it here rather than in a journal.

The thing that keeps a habit alive is not motivation. It is the container. A weekly post survived for a while because I had a rhythm, and the rhythm was the container, and when the rhythm broke nothing was holding the habit up.

Which is exactly what I tell people about a jar of freeze-dried fruit. It is not the fruit that keeps. It is the seal. When the seal fails, the contents do not gradually get worse, they just start being exposed, and exposure is all it takes.

So the fix is not to want it more. The fix is to rebuild the seal. I am going to write weekly again, and I am telling you here so that the promise is on the record and not just in my head.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC