Chalk it up to personal development; I missed a writing deadline and I haven’t fainted dead away.
For a writer, a deadline is a looming, ever-present line in the sand. The Thing Which Must Be Met.
All through college, seminary and grad school, I have made my writing deadlines. With more or less aplomb. For twenty years I had weekly sermon deadlines. And those deadlines were deadly, let me tell you. There is absolutely no getting around a Sunday morning pulpit. Nothing quite so serious, at least for me. I have written a spiritual reflections column every dozen weeks or so for a local paper since 1997. That’s over 100 columns of over 500 words each. I have pushed my editor a time or two, but never failed to make my deadline.
And I write as a volunteer for an online psychotherapy directory, GoodTherapy.org. I’m one of their Family Therapy topic experts. I have had this monthly gig for about a year and a half. It’s here, in my volunteer world of therapy expert, that I missed my deadline last week.
Fortunately, no one called, emailed or texted me to rattle my cage. I’m a volunteer, after all. No money changes hands, no federal forms get filed on this job. Yet I have met my self-imposed deadline time after time, until sometime last week. I just didn’t have the 700 words about family life and therapy to offer.
Very simply, my own therapy life and family demands didn’t give me room to think about my column. And I didn’t force myself to create something I wouldn’t have liked a day or so later. So the Family Therapy section of the large website awaits something new from me, soon. I will get to it, as soon as I can settle on my subject and create enough time in the day to do it justice.
Perhaps that will be the topic of my next submission; how family commitments often must come first before the stuff we would like to do, have promised to do, should do. I’ll think on it. It has potential.