Apparently, the Maven Had Nothing to Say

For the better part of a month, I have been staring at a blinking cursor. It has been remarkably consistent. Admirably so, really. Blink. Blink. Blink. Meanwhile, I have opened documents, closed documents, changed titles, changed them back, written paragraphs, deleted paragraphs, reorganized lists, researched ideas I didn't particularly care about, and engaged in several other highly sophisticated forms of procrastination that looked enough like writing to keep me from admitting that I wasn't actually writing.

Three weeks of blog posts came and went. Instagram sat untouched. Somewhere, I imagine an algorithm quietly removed my name from the Christmas card list.

I survived.

What bothered me wasn't the missed schedule. It was that every time I sat down to write, I felt like I'd already written the damn thing. Different title. Different story. Same destination. Leadership. Emotional intelligence. Self-awareness. Accountability. Look in the Mirror. Examine what you're carrying.

All things I believe in deeply. All foundational to what I am building with The Maven Chronicles. And all things that suddenly made me want to close the laptop and go do almost anything else. That's an awkward realization when you're the person who created all those standards for yourself. 

So, naturally, I tried discipline first.

Because that's what we're supposed to do, isn't it? When inspiration disappears, successful people don't wait for it. They show up. They execute. They remain consistent. They batch their content, optimize their calendars and dutifully feed the algorithm as though somewhere in Silicon Valley a small digital god is keeping score.

There is truth in that. There is also some bullshit in it.

Discipline matters. Consistency matters. But blindly continuing to produce something because you've always produced it isn't discipline. Sometimes it's just obedience wearing a productivity costume.

I have never been particularly good at obedience.

Over the last week I stopped trying to bully myself into writing and did the considerably more irritating thing. I got curious about why I didn't want to. Damn, I had been looking into a distorted mirror. For someone who created an entire philosophy around the Mirror, you'd think I would have arrived there sooner.

Apparently, I too enjoy taking the scenic route.

When I finally looked, the answer wasn't that I had lost my voice. It wasn't burnout. It wasn't a lack of ideas. And it certainly wasn't that I had nothing left to say.

It was almost embarrassingly the opposite. I had given myself too little room to say it.

Somewhere over the past nine months, I had started reducing the Maven to the parts of myself that were easiest to explain professionally. Leadership. Emotional intelligence. Executive experience. Difficult conversations. Accountability. The observations I have collected from years of watching people behave brilliantly, badly, and occasionally in ways that make me wonder how our species ever made it out of the cave.

That's all me. But it isn't all of me.

There is a woman underneath the résumé.

She rides motorcycles because she loves motorcycles, not because every stretch of asphalt contains a five-point leadership lesson.

She lives with Rottweilers who have taught her things about loyalty, instinct and presence, yes, but who also do ridiculous things that are funny simply because they're ridiculous.

She loves leather and lipstick, grease paint and machines, beauty and grit. She thinks about getting older. She thinks about being a woman. She notices what people wear, what they don't say, how they behave when they think nobody important is watching. She loves certain things for absolutely no productive reason. She has contradictions she doesn't feel particularly compelled to resolve.

She also has opinions. Quite a few, actually. Some are polished enough for the boardroom. Some should probably remain outside the building.

We'll see.

There are also things I don't understand yet. Questions I am still sitting with. People and relationships and pieces of human behavior I can observe without pretending I have neatly packaged wisdom to offer about them.

That may be the part I've been missing most. I had somehow created an expectation for myself that Maven should arrive with the answer. That's a hell of a burden to place on a woman who built her identity around asking better questions.

The Sage in me wants to understand. The Rebel wants to turn the thing over and ask who decided it had to be that way in the first place, and the Ruler has no intention of handing either of them over to a content calendar just because Monday came around again.

Uh, hello level up.

The Mirror isn't going anywhere. Neither is the Weight Inventory. They are the foundation,  and they are rock solid. What I no longer think is that  every journey toward the Mirror needs to begin by announcing that we're going there.

Sometimes we get there on a motorcycle. Sometimes through work. Sometimes through a dog, a friendship, a stranger, a dress, a song, a mistake, an irritation, a beautiful machine or a conversation that stays with us much longer than it had any right to. Sometimes life hands us a moment that means absolutely nothing until three days later when we're brushing our teeth and suddenly think, Well, shit.

There you are.

That's the Mirror I am interested in.

Not reflection manufactured on command. Recognition. That uncomfortable little second when somebody else's story stops being about them because you recognize yourself standing somewhere inside it.

And once you see yourself, the next question becomes harder to avoid.

I'd rather tell you a damn good story and let you discover the Mirror yourself. Maybe that's what my month of silence was trying to tell me.

The Maven didn't need another topic. She needed a bigger world. So I'm giving her one.

This isn't a reinvention. I'm not burning down The Maven Chronicles, changing everything I've built or emerging from a month-long absence with a dramatic announcement that I've “found myself.”

Please.

I knew where I was. I was sitting in front of a laptop being irritated by a cursor. What I found was permission I didn't actually need from anyone but apparently hadn't given myself: permission to let this become as dimensional as the woman creating it.

The foundation remains. The standards remain. The Mirror remains. The Weight remains. But there are going to be more roads leading to them.

There will be motorcycles and dogs. Work and women. Art and beauty. Age and ambition. Human behavior and bad behavior. Things that make me laugh. Things that piss me off. Things I love simply because I love them. Stories I've never told. Questions I haven't answered.

And probably a few opinions that make somebody uncomfortable.

It would be terribly disappointing if there weren't.

What I won't do is manufacture insight because a publishing schedule demands it. I won't turn every motorcycle ride into a metaphor for executive leadership. I won't pretend every experience arrives with a lesson attached. And I won't reduce a complicated life into something tidy enough to satisfy an algorithm.

The algorithm will cope. What I will do is pay attention. I'll tell you what I see. I'll tell you what I think. Sometimes I'll tell you what I still can't figure out. The Rebel will question it. The Sage will examine it. And the Ruler will decide what deserves a place in her world.

My hope is that somewhere in the middle of one of my stories, you may catch your own reflection. When that happens, I'm not going to tell you what you're supposed to see. That's between you and the Mirror. But I might ask what you're carrying because of it. And that is where things get interesting.

So yes, I've been quiet for a month.

I could apologize for the inconsistency, promise to do better, announce a new posting schedule and assure the internet that I have recommitted myself to content creation.

I'm not going to do that.

I wasn't absent. I was paying attention.

If you've been here from the beginning, stay close. The foundation hasn't moved.

The walls have.

And as for that blinking cursor?

It finally stopped looking like an accusation.

Now it looks like an invitation.

Having Grit is Gorgeous!

-Maven