Everyone is always going on and on about consistency. The idea that you should show up day in and day out and do The Thing because that's how you'll be "successful" (whatever that means). No bad days. No rest days. Maybe.
It’s a constant hustle to focus and laser in on the The One Big Thing—that’s what they are selling.
It kinda makes sense. But it’s also a way of making you feel like shit for being human because that level of commitment is not common. Probably not healthy.1 It’s a way for people to point the finger at the person trying because they aren’t doing it enough. It makes actual answers/solutions irrelevant because the response to any question becomes *CoNsIsTeNcY*.2
Last year, after over three decades on Planet Earth, I was diagnosed with ADHD. By that point, I knew I had it. Only because of lovely women on Instagram talking about their experience with it (same way I found out I had OCD—thanks, social media!).3
I’ll pass right over everything that the diagnosis/medication/etc brought on, but it made me take a HARD look at the way I move into and out of hobbies, passions, and pursuits.
See, growing up, there is a huge push to pick one thing. When people see you as someone with potential, they really want you to pick a thing and stay there. That way success lies. Or so they say.
Hopping into things and then letting that move you into something else is, in a word, bad. In multiple words, it’s: lazy, entitled, hedonistic, selfish, shallow, irresponsible, dangerous, erratic, unpredictable, hopeless, scary.
We are sold structure. Systems. Plans. Schedules. And for gods’ sake—commitment. We are sold “goodness” to fix our “badness.”
And so, it makes sense that we end up being told about CONSISTENCY.
But I think we what these people are actually talking about is being REGULAR.
(I promise I am going to try really hard to not make jokes about bowel movements from here on out…)
People shill regularity under the guise of consistency. Regularity is same day, same time. Set your clock to it. It’s the calendar, the no rest days mentality.
Consistency is fluid.4
It’s “I like/do several things and I spend time moving through them as I need so I can keep showing up to them over and over.” Consistency happens in cycles and over years. Consistency allows for dips and dark days. It spirals upward, letting you move through your life/practice/journey. Sometimes it feels like you are in the same spot as months ago, but the trend is infinitely onward, not stuck in a loop (regular).
Some people need the regularity. But a lot of us just cannot. Our brains don’t work that way. The pursuit of regularity (sold as consistency) robs us of our natural rhythms, flows, best days. We fight against our own internal programming to find the goodness we are told comes with the Regular-approach, because we have always been made to feel bad for not working that way.
But we aren’t wired that way.
We don’t need to be Regular, we need to find our Consistency—the natural fluidity of our process.
Do you want to have five projects at once and hop in and out of them based on the day?
Do you need to work on a shiny new thing when the older project feels really hard?
As long as you come back into the things you are working on, you can be consistent. It’s the long game, showing up as you can, and letting it be what you need to get work done. There’s no guilt or shame to swallow. And there’s no “fix” because nothing is broken. There’s no pursuit of “goodness” because there’s no badness.
I think releasing a sense of what I was supposed to do, what a Serious Whatever, Mature Whatever, Adult, whateverrrrr freed me up to trust the pulse of my own creative energy. I have a lot more joy and happiness in the things I do because I refuse to buy into the narrative that I need to perform my creativity in some dogmatic, prescriptive, neurotypical, regular way.
I’m consistent.
Regularity be damned.5
I wish you lots of consistency—grace and curiosity for your own process and creative rhythms. You’re not broken or bad if you need something different.
Spiral ever upward, friends. :)
I say probably because I’m sure there is one thing that one person can think of that is healthy to be like this with, but not because I actually really believe it.
Almost as a rule, the people who shill that are people with a lot of money, help, and (REMARKABLY) no kids… Huh.
Girls + women often experience/present with their neurodiversity differently than men (there be an additional footnote here to add more nuance, but that’s for another post)… And have a significantly harder time getting diagnosed. (GASP—a gender gap in healthcare. We are SHOCKED.)
Don’t make a joke, don’t make a joke…
You know what I mean.