Bringing Mae Flowers

Writing for work was sapping my confidence and creativity.

I work in the travel industry, and genuinely enjoy my job. I get to work with innkeepers and campgrounds from all around the country (and Canada), and learn about the hidden gems in cities and towns of all sizes. In many ways, it’s a dream job. But, the workload over the last few months had become stifling. We started adding new clients faster than our team could handle, causing us to rush through ads, articles, and reports just to make deadlines. Eventually, we had to use AI to compensate.

I soon found the danger in using AI too much at work.

Ethics aside and work quality aside, I found a personal danger in using AI: skill loss. Practice makes perfect. You develop skills by using them, so if you stop using them, you start to lose them. And that’s what started to happen to me with writing. While I never considered the articles I wrote for work to be part of my personal writing development, they were doing more for me than I thought. I just didn’t realize it until I stopped writing them on my own. The more I used AI at work, the worse my articles were. And the worse the articles were, the more my confidence fell. And the more my confidence fell, the more I felt the need to use AI. It became a vicious cycle.

I was losing my motivation to write anything at all.

Maybe using AI was the symptom and not the cause, but I was experiencing writer’s block in both my personal and professional life. I had ideas. I knew what I wanted to write, and I knew that I wanted to write, but I couldn’t get the words to flow. I became overwhelmed at the thought of filling a blank page, so I started procrastinating on projects and distracting myself with other tasks. Eventually, I had to admit to myself that I was avoiding writing.

Returning to the page didn’t happen all at once.

I started going through my old work, starting with this blog. I started this blog in 2017, and had nearly 500 posts. As you can imagine, both me and my content have undergone a lot of changes in the past 8 years. To be honest, most of my older work was just bad. I ended up deleting literally hundreds of posts, but found a few gems worth saving. I left or updated a handful, and saved a few that had potential into a drive to recycle later. That gave me a little spark of motivation.

The next step was to get inspired.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that I bought a book called “Tarot for Storytellers”. I’ve been going through this book chapter by chapter and trying the exercises. The unique approach to both tarot and writing makes me think about things in a new way, which opens me up to new possibilities. The mix of exercises, ranging from tarot practice to writing prompts keeps things from getting stale. I’ve found two of the exercises particularly helpful:

1. Listing out all of my projects and assigning them a stage in the creative cycle: inspiration, action, editing/pruning, manifestation
2. Have a conversation with my Tarot cards about writing.

The first helped me organize all of my many ideas in one place, asses what stage I’m at with each of them, and consider what step I need to take next. This is what encouraged me to submit my children’s book to some potential publishers. But, it was the second exercise that got me to start working on my novel for the first time in months. It forced me to face my fears head on, and work past them. Once I acknowledged my lack of confidence and forced myself to stop overthinking, I was able to start writing again.

So what about AI?

I haven’t used it at work in a few weeks. Things have calmed down enough at work that I can take the time to write the articles without help. And just like using AI was causing a downward spiral, not using AI has had a positive impact. My articles are better, which makes both me (and my clients) happier. This builds my confidence, and encourages me to write more in both my professional and personal life.