I write slowly. I have made peace with this, but it took longer than the writing itself.
For years I tried to write the way I read about other writers writing: in long uninterrupted bursts, blocks of two thousand words, voice unbroken from morning into late afternoon. The advice was always the same — get the draft down, fix it later, momentum is everything. I tried. It produced sentences I did not believe.
So I stopped.
I write now in passes. A paragraph in the morning. A line removed from yesterday's paragraph. Sometimes only the rhythm of a sentence — not the meaning of it — is what I am after. A book takes me four years. People hear that and assume something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. It is simply the speed at which the work becomes true.
I think there is a small, quiet permission worth granting yourself, which is this: you do not have to write at the speed of the culture around you. The culture is not the work. The culture is what is happening while you are not paying attention to the work. The work has its own clock.
If you are writing slowly, and the slowness feels honest, keep going. The reader will arrive later, but they will arrive — and they will know the difference.