Miluskaberrospiyahoo.Com asked Elizabeth Gilbert:

I am a recent journalism grad. I'm having a hard time finding work as a writer -- my problem is lack of confidence. There are times where everything aligns and writing feels euphoric and then there are times I feel like I'm fighting a hopeless battle with my own creativity. Have you every felt this way? If yes, how have you overcome these overwhelming feelings?Thank you for your light, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Gilbert Sweetheart, I'm sorry things are hard for you right now. But I want you to stop living your creative life as if it must always a swinging pendulum between two unsustainable extremes: euphoria, and hopelessness. I don't want you to become addicted to that cycle. You are stuck in the cycle (and the dark romance) of agony and the ecstasy, basically. Those are the only two settings on your creativity dial, and therefore you are setting yourself up for suffering. I'm going to ask you to consider calibrating your creativity to a much more boring but effective setting, which is just: steadfastness. Don't chase euphoria and don't descend into helplessness. Just do steadfast work, like a farmer. Set your alarm for the same time every day, and show up for your work as if it is a mundane chore, not the sum of all human experience. Don't work long hours; just do a little bit every day, even if it's boring. I want you to de-romanticize your own mythology around creativity. Bring it down to the ground level. Lower the stakes. Punch the clock, like every other hourly worker. Don't wait for inspiration or suffer in anguish — just be diligent and humble. Learn how to take pleasure in approaching your work with simple curiosity and constant steadiness. I would rather that you wrote for one boring hour every day than 10 ecstatic hours once a year. Try to imagine that you are neither the greatest writer who ever lived, nor the worst. You are neither an eagle nor a worm. You are just a regular old plow mule. You are just a person who likes to write, and sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn't. What I'm preaching here isn't glamorous, but it's very productive. One way or another, you've got to get out of those extremes, or you're going to make yourself crazy — and worst of all, you won't ever get any good, solid work done. If you can't be a plow mule, you'll have trouble being a writer. You can do this!

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