Monday Motivation: Motivation is Missing... Carry on Anyway!

12 hours ago
3 min read

There are seasons where motivation disappears — not dramatically and not with some grand speech. It just quietly packs a bag and leaves—no forwarding address, no explanation, incredibly rude!

Projects stall, ideas sit half-finished, and new hobbies get paused because one tiny missing piece means nothing can move forward, which is deeply annoying when the excitement was there.

Lately, I’ve been living in that space. Feeling unproductive. Struggling to start things, and sometimes struggling even more to finish them. There’s this quiet background feeling that everything is heavy. Sometimes that heaviness is personal, sometimes emotional, and sometimes it’s the weight of watching the world and wondering what on earth is happening right now. When all of that stacks together, motivation isn’t the first thing that shows up — survival is.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that motivation is supposed to come first and action follows. Unfortunately, that isn’t always how it works. More often, motivation shows up after the action, which feels like a terrible system design but here we are. The part no one talks about is how hard “doing anything” can feel when your nervous system is carrying more than usual. That doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means you’re human, you’re processing, and your capacity isn’t unlimited.

This is something I’m reminding myself of right now. Putting a project on hold isn’t quitting. Needing one missing piece doesn’t equal failure — even when that piece is apparently unavailable everywhere on the planet. Losing momentum is not the same as losing interest. Sometimes it’s just a pause. Life has pauses, healing has pauses, energy has pauses. None of that erases who you are or what you were excited about. Those things wait. Thankfully, they tend to be more patient than we are.

There are also times when the world itself feels loud. Too many headlines, too many tragedies, too many reminders that life is fragile. That kind of constant background noise creates a strange emotional fatigue where even small personal things feel heavier. Not because they are objectively harder, but because you are already tired before you begin. This is where self-kindness stops being a nice idea and becomes necessary. Less pressure, smaller expectations, gentler goals — not forever, just for now.

Right now, motivation might look smaller than we think it should. It might be one task, opening the notebook, touching the project, stepping outside, or deciding to try again tomorrow. Not transformation. Not dramatic productivity. Just staying connected to yourself enough that you don’t walk away completely.

Slumps are uncomfortable, but they aren’t the opposite of growth. They are often part of it. They’re the quieter seasons where energy rebuilds, identity shifts, and something internal rearranges even when nothing visible is happening. It looks like stagnation from the outside, but a lot of the time it’s integration — slow, messy, invisible work that doesn’t photograph well and therefore gets very little credit.

So if everything feels heavy right now, you’re not alone. If motivation feels missing, you’re not broken. If projects are paused, nothing has gone wrong. This is a season, not a verdict.

The expectation isn’t perfection or productivity. It’s simply this: keep a small door open to yourself. Keep a thread of curiosity. Keep showing up in ways that feel possible.

Some days the win is productivity. Some days the win is rest. And some days — the most important ones — the win is staying.

The work right now isn’t doing EVERYTHING - it’s not disappearing from your own life.