Why writing keeps getting pushed
It’s not about finding more time
If there’s one thing I regret not investing time in when I was younger, it’s learning to play the guitar.
When I was 20, I even had a teacher coming to my house every week. But at the time, I was doing a six-hour-a-day internship, attending university, and running a side project writing about the underground music scene in Rio de Janeiro. It didn’t take long before I convinced myself I simply didn’t have time for the guitar.
The desire went quiet after that for more than ten years. It only returned with real force in my early 30s, when my father-in-law came to visit for a couple of weeks, and I told him how much I had always wanted to play. He’s a guitarist himself, so he encouraged me to get a cheap one and just start. We went to a nearby shop and bought an Alvarez acoustic that same day.
While he was visiting, I practiced every day, and he showed me the basics. After he left, I downloaded an app to keep going and kept the guitar in the living room, so every day, no matter what, we’d face each other.
But after a while, the pattern repeated. Work picked up, projects demanded more attention, and as soon as things got a little tight, the guitar was the first thing to fall away.
Another few years passed, and at 39, I found myself watching countless YouTube videos from guitarists. Sometimes they’d get into music theory, and it sounded like Mandarin to me, but I still kept watching. Something about it kept pulling me back.
And then, slowly, the desire returned.
I’ll be honest: having failed twice before, my mind had plenty of reasons why it didn’t make sense to try again. But this time felt different. Maybe it was age, I don’t know. But there was a realization in my mind that if not now, this would become a regret I’d carry with me.
So I started looking at it from a new perspective.
It wasn’t just another hobby to squeeze into my routine.
It was something that mattered enough to be protected.
No matter how the day went, how tired I was, how busy things got, or how convincing the excuses sounded, I decided that at least 20 minutes of my day would belong to the guitar. Not even a CIA negotiator could convince me otherwise.
That shift finally gave the practice legitimacy. It stopped being optional, something I’d do if there was time.
It’s been a year now. I still have a long way to go before I can brag about my guitar chops. But that’s no longer the point. What truly matters is that I can’t see myself stopping anytime soon.
Playing the guitar is now part of my life.
Writing needs more than just time
When I talk to people who feel the pull to write, what I often hear is that they don’t have time.
And the reasons are real.
Life is crowded with demands: jobs where they’re doing the work of three or more people, kids who barely let them sleep at night, endless notifications and obligations competing for every remaining bit of attention. By the time writing enters the picture, it already feels exhausting.
There’s also something deeper. For them, writing is one of the few places where their thoughts, memories, and questions can take shape. It’s something you don’t squeeze into the margins. It asks for presence.
But if there’s anything I learned from my experience with the guitar, it’s that finding more time, by itself, does not solve the problem.
Time is part of the issue. But legitimacy is what determines whether a practice survives a crowded life.
Writing becomes possible when it crosses a threshold and earns the right to be protected.
That does not mean life suddenly becomes less demanding. There will still be messages to answer, work to finish, children to care for, and a hundred small things that feel urgent enough to pull you away from the page.
But those things already have a place in your life. They already feel justified.
Writing often does not.
No one is waiting for it. Nothing immediately breaks when you skip it. So it gets pushed to tomorrow. Then tomorrow becomes three days. Three days become a week. And before you notice, months have passed, and writing starts to feel like a mirage.
I went through that cycle more than once with the guitar.
Until I stopped asking when I would have time for it, and decided that part of my day belonged to the practice.
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