Consciously changed emotions: I have, for eight years, considered writing to be "the thing I should do." I possessed an idea of myself as a Writer (with a capital W) even though I did not want to pursue it as a career and often had trouble keeping it up as a habit. I've never questioned (or wanted to question) what writing is to me as a value, a contribution to society, or as a worthwhile endeavor. As I grew older, writing became a defining feature of my mental landscape, making it that much harder to question.

Having recently finished school and begun work, I ran out of my classic excuses for why I do not write as much as I'd like. So, I stood up and outlined the terminal and instrumental values of writing and the excuses I often found myself using when I did not write.

The first effect this had was to reduce Writing to writing: making the activity a simple one rather than a sacred one. Second, I found that one driving motivation that has kept me thinking about Writing, rather than writing, is envy: I compared myself to past writers I enjoyed and felt I should publish at as young an age as them, in as large a quantity, as often, be recognized as much etc. So, my motivation was not for personal enjoyment or art's sake, but for envy. Seeing this, I took steps to cut out that envy, to reduce it and see how much my drive to write remained. This, finally, helped me reshape writing from a defining feature of my mental landscape into a tool in my tool box. Or at least to a project in my portfolio.