Stop and Start
As someone who had been drilled the importance of consistency before their words were even coherent speech, and especially as someone with troublesome obsessiveness to the notion of streaks, I find it amusing that I'm now reaching for my sketchbook multiple times a day as if the decade of hiatus had never happened at all. I had put off getting back to drawing with many, many, many excuses and it took me some personal growth to shift my mindset to one more conducive to casual hobby, but I had initially expected more resistance—you learn to anticipate your catastrophizing brain after years of living with it.
It wasn't all smooth sailing, sure. I have to convince myself not to be too precious with paper. After all, I still have tons of half-finished notebooks from college, and while they're not going to withstand markers they do well to practice croquis. As a treat, I get to try some better paper too, and actually trying to use them because I won't get anywhere if I save them for "when I get better".
But turns out accidentally ending that 820-days of Duolingo wasn't the end of the world, missing one day of [insert anything here] out of sickness doesn't stop you from getting up the next day and resume as usual.
Reality is way more nuanced than what I painted, of course. Everyone knows one cheat day can turn into totally abandoning your exercise (or anything you put down on your new year's resolution), but I feel like there's so much emphasis on not stopping that we often have inadequate resource to restart once we've stopped. To stop is mired in shame, an admission that you have "failed" once, never mind that sometimes the situation really is out of our control. So fine, I stopped drawing. You relapsed into drinking. The gym membership is running out.
The world does not end, and you can restart as long as you're alive. I can regret not restarting sooner, or I can accept it as what it is and I'm back anyway. No one's going to know I ever stopped. Maybe one day I'll end up having to put this on the backburner again, and that's fine. I'll just start again then.
Funnily, it feels way easier to maintain a streak when I don't try to "keep a streak". My brain has such an aversion to "chore" that I've stopped trying any sort of "habit tracker". As always, what works for me may not work for other people, so in the end it goes back to knowing how your brain ticks and devise workaround in order to get what you want out of life.
So go out. Make art. Hit the gym.
So you've stopped once. Give yourself grace to try again.