When something you love starts to feel heavy
How meaningful practices slowly become emotionally overloaded.
After a couple of hours driving, stopping at a few different surf spots along the way to check the waves, my wife and I finally arrived at Arrifana Beach. She had kept a straight face throughout the entire drive, enduring my obsessive commentary about wind direction, swell period, and tide conditions, until I made one final remark.
Picture this: the road curves around the hill, and suddenly the landscape opens. There it is — Arrifana Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in Portugal. The late afternoon light had turned the towering cliffs a deep burnt orange, while the ocean shifted between transparent green near the shore and a heavy dark blue further out at sea. Down below, surfers walked barefoot along the ramp with boards tucked under their arms, families slowly unloaded their cars, and the whole place moved with the kind of calm rhythm that makes you instinctively slow down as well.
And the very first thing I said to my wife, while staring at that magnificent view, was:
“The waves are complete garbage.”
Well, she’s Italian, which means she has a very low tolerance for BS. And even though she loves me enough to spend hours driving around the Portuguese coast searching for waves for me to surf, that comment was absolutely not welcomed in that moment.
Still, despite the terrible conditions, I paddled out and tried to catch a few waves anyway — which only made my frustration grow further and probably made my wife hate me a little more for my complete lack of gratitude.
Later that day, when we were back at our hotel, I took some time to reflect on what had happened: “Why couldn’t I simply enjoy that day of vacation with my wife at that marvelous beach despite the lack of waves?”
What I realized that night was that surfing had taken on a weight in my life that simply wasn’t sustainable.
For months on end, I’d spend most of my energy working hard, knowing I’d eventually have my escape valve once the next surf trip arrived. Surfing had become my way of reconnecting with nature and with parts of myself that tended to disappear beneath the noise and structure of daily life.
And since living in the Netherlands rarely gives me the chance to be in the water, I began looking at those trips almost as a form of restoration — as if a few days of waves could somehow recover everything that had slowly drifted out of balance inside me.
So you can imagine how I felt when I finally arrived at the surf destination and Poseidon decided not to deliver the waves I had been hoping for.
By placing so much expectation on those trips, every disappointing session started to feel disproportionately heavy. If the conditions weren’t good, I felt frustrated. If the waves were good but I didn’t surf well, my entire day was ruined.
The fear of feeling that frustration all over again even started making me hesitate the next time I considered booking another surf trip.
“Is it worth the money? The effort? The time?” I’d ask myself.
Little by little, something that once made me feel alive started feeling emotionally loaded.
Is your writing carrying a heavy weight too?
When I asked new readers what writing meant to them, I got responses like:
writing helps me process emotions
the rhythm and heartbeat of my life
writing is how I remain inwardly livable
my ability to analyse and understand my thoughts
where confusion became clarity
my way to communicate with the world
the vehicle to share a gift to the next generation
When I stopped to analyze all the responses, I realized that writing was often carrying three roles at once: helping people process their thoughts, regulate their emotions, and contribute something meaningful to the world.
And once a single practice starts carrying that much psychological weight, disappointment becomes almost inevitable.
Because as soon as your writing stops flowing, it feels like failure on multiple levels.
You finally sit down to write, believing you’ve carved out a moment to reconnect with the page, only for an unexpected interruption to appear. Almost immediately, frustration takes over, and you begin blaming the lack of the “right conditions” to write.
Over time, if nothing changes in your relationship with writing, you can slowly end up in the same place I reached with surfing: questioning whether something that once brought meaning and aliveness into your life is even worth it anymore.
The truth about surf trips is that you never really know what you’re going to get.
I’ve been to places many consider the best surf spots on earth and had average sessions. I’ve also surfed in lesser-known places and walked away with memories I’ll probably carry for the rest of my life.
Writing is not that different.
Sometimes you’ll only have fifteen minutes and still somehow feel deeply inspired. Other times, you’ll finally have three uninterrupted hours to write, only to spend them circling the same idea without finding the words for it.
We carry this compelling image of the writer seized by inspiration, disappearing into a kind of trance, and emerging hours later with something extraordinary.
That story, however, works far better in fiction than in real life.
When people internalize that fantasy, writing begins to carry an unbearable weight. Every session becomes loaded with expectation, and when reality inevitably fails to match it, frustration quickly takes over.
But when writing becomes a practice you return to consistently, a few difficult days no longer feel catastrophic. They simply become part of the process.
You stop expecting writing to feel magical every time you sit down, and begin appreciating the many different things the practice can offer instead: clarity, reflection, tension, surprise, emotional release, sometimes even the simple satisfaction of having shown up at all.
Once I understood that I needed to loosen my grip on what each session was supposed to give me, both my writing and my relationship with surfing became far more enjoyable.
I obviously still have days when I fall back into my old patterns. But those moments show up far less often than they used to.
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