The true cost of not doing the thing✔️

On ghosting yourself, small actions + analogue to-do-lists

“There’s a practice available to each of us – the practice of embracing the process of creation in service of better. The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output.”

Seth Godin

Hi Friend,

1. I found myself questioning whether I was going to write this newsletter this week. I noticed metrics on my last one slipped a little. Substack has become so noisy. My friend Claire Venus posted that Substack open and delivery rates have “tanked”.

Moments like this make you ask: What’s the long game here? Should I be using this time elsewhere? Who is this ultimately for? Also, everything that’s happening in the world.

Then I think of that low-vibe, feeling of not writing this piece, not connecting, not showing up to community. The icky FOMO I wouldn’t be able to shake off on Thursday morning - my publishing day. Like I was ghosting myself.

2. Lately, I’ve switched up my to-do-list. I’m almost embarrassed to write my deeply analogue planning process, knowing ChatGPT could probably do it better.
Each Sunday afternoon, I take my A4 length list and organise it in a notebook under:

· 5 Most important tasks
· 5 Secondary tasks of importance
· 5 Additional tasks

When tasks get carried over, week after week (which they always do) there’s a little reckoning. As I confront my own resistance to what I’m not actively pursuing, shifting one task after another onto a fresh list, I have to ask: What am I gathering this pile of undone things for? What am I holding myself back from — and why?

3. As poets, we’re taught to name the ache— the specificity of a particular longing. Whether it’s loss, grief, homesickness, regret, or love.
To find language around that.
What’s the ache that comes with not doing the thing you long to do?
Of not being the person you long to be?

4. I recently flicked through some of my old journals from, maybe, five years ago (the parts that I could read my own handwriting😘). They’re from before I had a consistent creative practice, or anything close to what I’d call a “writing life”.
The current running through them is palpable — the feeling of inhabiting the shadows, the longing for more. The vice grip of stuck-ness, of not bringing what was inside of me into the world. That sense that my real life was elsewhere.

5. I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between creativity and visibility— how expressing ourselves in our work and businesses can become a practice.
Not because it’s another “should” or out of fear of missing out on opportunities, or pressure to be seen performing in my business in a certain way.
But because not expressing ourselves fully keeps us smaller.
What we shut down externally, we also close off internally.
And there’s a cost to that.

6. What’s the cost of not showing up for you?
Of breaking the promise you made to yourself on Sunday evening to show up this week, only to get to Thursday and realise… oh.
For me, it’s like the low-grade, persistent hangover you get after two glasses of — possibly crappy — wine.
It’s the backwash that repeats when you don’t post the Reel that could support your upcoming launch, when you sit on the LinkedIn post until it times out, when you miss the third newsletter in a row.
That gap between who you want to be — as a creative, a leader, your most authentic self — and the version of you that says, “I’ll do it tomorrow. Maybe.”
Instead of building the business and impact you know you're longing to create.

7. What if your marketing — your self-promotion — became your most creative and strategic outlet?
Not your most dreaded, niggly chore?
What if it became a process that not only sustains your business, but sustains you — in how it shapes your life, how it connects you to your community, how it makes you more visible in your days?
Beyond brand success, alchemising into simply… who you are.
A truly more expansive life.

8. On LinkedIn, my friend and London Writer’s Salon co-founder, Parul Bavishi, shared a Rick Rubin quote:
“The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.”
I messaged her and asked if I could steal it for this newsletter.
Isn’t it the same for the creative? The founder? The marketer? The poet?
It’s all the tiny, daily things you do that add up.
The things you say yes to.
The things you get done.
This is who you become — stepping out of your shadow life into the brightest sunshine.

9. I have a poetry deadline this week. I have to send my mentor a handful of edited poems by the end of the week. I sat down with a new-ish poem today. I played with a line break. Typed the word “dissolve” as a prompt to come back to. Changed some syntax. Closed the document.
That was it for the day.
It felt like enough.
I’d done the thing.

Friend, name one thing you set out to do this week, this month, this year.
The one taking up all the headspace right now.
What’s one small action you can take toward it?
Share it in the comments below.
And go do it.

---

As always, I’m so, so grateful for every ❤️, comment and reply. Thank you for being here.

With love,
Antonia xo

---