Happy Monday, ,

I've been thinking about a pattern in my life, and it's one that took me a long time to see clearly. My entire life has been about not feeling ready. I didn't feel ready for kindergarten, so I did pre-kindergarten twice. I didn't feel ready for college, and that hesitation stretched into years. I wasn't ready to become a nurse, wasn't ready to write my thesis, and when it came time to become a writer, that same voice was there, insisting I wasn't ready for that either.

This isn't something that happened once and then resolved. It's the shape of how I've moved through the world for as long as I can remember, always not feeling ready, always with that voice asking why even try if you're not ready. It's the impostor syndrome that lives in the background, telling me I'm not cut out for this, whatever this is.

Here's what I know from living inside that pattern: the feeling of readiness doesn't arrive on its own. You can wait for it indefinitely. You can spend years preparing, learning more, researching, planning, and the feeling will still be absent. I know this because I've done it. I've spent time in that waiting space, and what I learned is that it's infinite. There's always more to learn, always another angle to consider, always one more thing you need to understand before you can actually begin.

When I lost my sight, I wasn't ready. There's no amount of preparation that makes you ready to lose something that fundamental to how you move through the world. There's no research, no planning, no mental rehearsal that grants you the certainty you want before it happens. Life doesn't ask if you're ready. It just happens, and then you're living in a world you have to learn how to navigate without the thing you relied on completely.

I remember the period after, when I was trying to figure out who I was going to become. Would I become bitter? Would I throw my life away because of one thing? Would I become a burden to the people around me? Your entire identity goes through a blender during something like that, and what comes out the other side is completely unrecognizable from who you were before. I was terrified, grieving, and disoriented in ways I hadn't imagined possible, and I was doing things anyway.

I was learning routes and asking for help and navigating a world I no longer recognized, all while not feeling ready for any of it, and I was doing it anyway because there was no choice in it. Life had moved forward, and I had to move with it. Two years later, when I went back to school, I still wasn't ready. I went anyway.

What I learned from that time is something I still carry with me now. Not feeling ready doesn't stop life from throwing you the hardest curveballs, and what you do in those moments is what actually matters.

I wouldn't change what happened to me. I know that sounds strange, but it's true. Becoming blind has made me who I am today. While it is still hard to be blind, I've learned so much about what I can handle and what I can't. I've learned that I'm capable of far more than I thought, mostly because I never got the option to wait until I felt ready.

And here's the thing that connects all of this back to writing, back to why I'm telling you this: I still don't feel ready to call myself a writer. That voice is still there, telling me I'm not cut out for this, that I don't know enough, that real writers don't struggle like I do. Every single day I sit down with that voice present and write anyway. I work on one scene, spend time with one client, take one action that moves me closer to the work, and I do all of that while holding the doubt, rather than waiting for it to disappear.

This is where the technique matters, because if you're going to do things while not feeling ready, you need a way to recognize what's actually happening in your mind when that voice shows up.

Let me walk you through the loop, because once you can see it, you can work with it.

It starts with a thought, the irrational thought. Something like I'm not ready to start writing, or I need to learn more first. This thought arrives in your mind and it feels true, feels like wisdom, feels like you're being responsible and careful and taking your craft seriously.

That thought creates an emotion, usually fear or doubt layered with anxiety, a sense of being overwhelmed or the feeling that you're fundamentally not good enough. The emotion is real even though it came from the irrational thought, and your body feels it. Your chest tightens, your mind gets foggy, and you feel less capable than you did a moment ago.

And that emotion drives your behavior. Instead of writing, you research and plan. You tell yourself you'll come back to it when you're more prepared. You scroll through writing forums and read about other people's processes. You do everything except the thing you actually want to do. And here's where it gets slippery: all of that looks productive. It looks responsible. From the outside, no one would call it avoidance. You'd call it diligence yourself. But the behavior is actually protecting you from something you're afraid of.

The cycle reinforces itself. You don't write, so the idea that you're not ready enough feels even more true the next time. The voice gets louder, the emotion gets stronger, and the behavior becomes more entrenched. That loop keeps you exactly where you are.

So how do you break it? You start by catching the thought before it runs away with you. When you notice yourself saying I need to learn more before I start, you pause and ask: is this actually true, or is my brain protecting me from something?

Here's what I've learned about distinguishing between a true thought and an irrational one. A true thought has an endpoint because it names something specific and solvable. I don't understand my character's motivation in this scene, so I need to think about that before I write it. Once you identify what you need, you can address it and move on. An irrational thought is infinite and keeps shifting: I need to learn more about writing, about character development, about dialogue, about pacing. You could spend your entire life in that pursuit and never feel ready.

An irrational thought is also vague. "You're not ready. You're not a real writer. You don't have what it takes." These are abstractions, and your brain reaches for them because they can't be disproven. A true thought will name what you actually need to address. An irrational thought hides inside generalizations.

And this is important: your brain throws these irrational thoughts at you because it's trying to protect you. It's saying, if we don't start, we can't fail. If we don't claim the identity, no one can tell us we don't deserve it. If we wait for readiness, we avoid the vulnerability of putting our work out there and discovering it's not good enough. Your brain thinks this is love, that it's taking care of you.

But the protection has a cost, and the cost is everything you actually want.

Once you recognize the thought, the work is simply to acknowledge it. You say, yes, I see you, I know you're trying to protect me, and then you do the thing anyway.

One action is all it takes to interrupt the cycle. It can be opening the document, writing a paragraph, thinking through a scene. What matters is that it's real and that it happens while the voice is still present, still telling you that you're not ready.

What happens when you do this is that you start to build evidence, real lived evidence that you can do things you don't feel ready for. Your brain pays attention to evidence and learns from repetition. Every time you acknowledge the voice and take action anyway, you're learning that readiness and action don't have to be linked, that you can be trusted to move forward, that the feeling of not being ready is something you can hold without letting it determine what you do.

I still feel unready, and that voice is still there. But I do it anyway, because I've learned something from a lifetime of not feeling ready and doing things anyway. I've learned that the feeling might never change, and the voice might always be present, but action is more powerful than either of them.

Every day I choose one action that moves me closer to being a writer, and every time I do that, I'm interrupting the cycle where the irrational thought feeds the emotion, the emotion drives avoidance, and the avoidance reinforces the thought.

This is how you move forward when readiness never comes. You acknowledge the voice, and you move forward anyway. You do one thing, and then tomorrow you do one thing again, and the repetition is what changes everything.

Maria Acosta Ramirez Accountability & Mindset Coach | Alpha Reader, MAR Literary Services Florida, USA gravatar.com/unabashedd4deba3b56 ​

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