Ant hills and all that . . .

Isn't it funny how sometimes the things we struggle with for days, usually turns out to have a ridiculously simple answer. Like coming to a river and getting all flustered because you can't decide whether you should build a raft or a bridge. Then someone points out it's only knee deep. The whole time you were just too afraid to get wet to even look at how deep the water was. You could have waded across in the first minute, but the answer was too simple for you to see.
That's pretty much how my life is characterized. Like all the time.
I take small problems and I blow them out of proportion. I have to write a new scene, so I do all this research, make three drafts, and stay up all night pounding out a rough idea, while making maps, cultural cues and even inventing a few words for my fake language when I could have blown through the scene and been half-way through the next chapter if I had actually sat down and WROTE.
I spend a saddening amount of time richening the world with details that will probably never make it into the final product, polishing characters that will probably be cut, and setting up complex rabbit trails designed to excite and confuse the reader only to later decide, "that's not the direction I want to go."
Case in point; last year for NaNoWriMo, as always, I set aside North of the Sword (the tentative name of my main project), to explore other other projects that I've been intrigued by. I spent 15 of the 30 days, pounding away at a furious +2k words a day only in the end to realize every single word was worthless because none of it matched to the story I was trying to tell. (long story short, I was continuing from a previous year's NaNo project, and the tone/setting/characters/pacing were all inharmoniously different.) I spent dozens of hours planning schemes for my characters; plotting and executing twists and double-crosses because I wanted to try for an espionage genre mash-up; which didn't mesh at all with the adventure/western feel I had in the first half of the story I was continuing from. I scrapped the project (side-lined, not deleted), and quit NaNo early, but it took me a few weeks to recover from the resulting depression. And yes, my failures in writing can lead to some very real emotional kickback. It's the price for vesting myself in an artistically driven project.
But the whole dilemma happened because I tried to make the new half something that it wasn't, I was too focused on experimenting with aspects of the story instead of doing the simple (right) thing and just continuing the story. I tried to be a multi-genre genius, and ended up wasting a whole month of prime writing momentum and popping a painful bubble of pride. In short: I am my own worst enemy. And I don't see myself wising up any time soon. Sorry.

Journal expert:
Courage is not a mountain. It is not a lion or a storm. There is no courage in victory or ambition. Courage is not a shout; it is a whisper. So faint it may be drowned out by the splash of a single raindrop.