Crossroads: A Self Esteem Test

“Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down/ And they all led me straight back home to you.” Gram Parsons, Return of the Grievous Angel

No matter how many roads you’ve gone down in search of your life path, I believe you can find the one that’s right for you. But, when you’re feeling stuck, it can be very hard to have the faith that any of the roads you’ve taken is ever going to lead anywhere.

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Lost Highway Blues Rules Of The Road: BE A MISFIT (NOT A FAILURE)

I experienced writer’s block for the first time when I finished graduate school and started teaching at Indiana University. When I got to Indiana, I was expected to revise my dissertation for publication. After a year and a half of work, I had revised less than half of it. By the middle of my second year at IU, my senior colleagues were expressing concern that I was falling so far behind schedule that my chances of being recommended for tenure were in jeopardy. I began to feel like a failure.

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Lost Highway Blues Rules of the Road: DON’T WRITE A RESUME

In my first blog post, I talked about how I don’t like to write and how I discovered this when I took a creative writing class my freshman year in college. As is usually the case, the story is actually a little bit more complicated.

I very much enjoyed writing some of my college papers. In my junior year, for example, I took a class on the psychology of the unconscious. I didn’t particularly like the class but I loved writing the final paper. I was interested in how contemporary psychological theories understood an old religious question: Do we come to feel good about ourselves by doing good works or do we need more direct ways of transforming painful feelings like guilt and shame?

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Lost Highway Blues Rules of the Road: DON’T DO WHAT YOU’RE GOOD AT

For me, the most daunting challenge of starting a website was facing up to the fact that I’d have to write on a regular basis. I don’t like to write. I consider not having to write one of the perks of my work as a therapist.

I struggled for months over how to communicate regularly to my subscribers. I thought about a podcast. I thought about using other people’s articles. Neither of those alternatives felt right.

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