I reached the stage of a (non-fiction) writing project where I had tons of notes, but no sense of what an eventual manuscript might look like. I discovered Zettelkasten and it was a revelation, not because I think it's the only way to write, but because it was an answer to my precise problem of how to turn a ton of notes into a manuscript. I'm still a long way from being finished with my project, but I can get my pen moving every day and that in itself has been an enormous relief.

Now this isn't an advice, but I'm gonna share it anyway.

One of my family members knew that I wrote a lot of stories and poems and told me to stop wasting time writing them.

And when I think about it this way, I stop overthinking my stories and poems because at the end of the day, nobody is reading them except me.