The other day, I sat to the best sushi in Nijmegen (Sushi Toku, take-out only) with a friend. We hadn’t seen each other in a while - since February to be exact. The first thing she said to me?
“What’s wrong?”
Mind you, the last time we got together, the private part of our conversation (then over ramen and her first taste of tokayaki) started along the lines of “What are we going to do with you,” so the strong start wasn’t a huge surprise.
She of the powerful first questions doesn’t accept conversational deflections easily. After listening carefully to everything you say while dithering, she inevitably returns to whatever troubles her.
I wondered out loud how she knew anything was wrong and quickly realized - I haven’t been writing. Not here, at least. Not for the public. I haven’t submitted anything. I haven’t posted much. I have crawled back into myself.
It’s not writers block unless tending to yourself while things fall apart is writers block. It might be. The fact that we allow ourselves to think we’re falling apart might be part of the problem.
But all that aside - this realization that my circle of friends now assume something is wrong if I’m not writing regularly seems to officially confirm that the world agrees with my writer status. They understand writing not as something I do, but part of who I am.
For those of you still waiting for the tea - she was right. Things have been off. Life has been challenging. It’s been hard. I’m doing alright, though. I’ve just been shy about writing again.
The thing about a newsletter is that it’s writing we send off into the great world with no real idea what happens to it. The advice is to keep going until you get some traction, but that requires thousands upon thousands of words written into a vacuum. It includes dozens of vulnerable posts that will only receive comments about a grammar or spelling mistake.
So there’s a rhythm that goes with the end of a newsletter, or the unexpected gap.
First, you miss a week, maybe two. No one says anything. No one sends a message to ask you if they missed your email. You decide no one noticed.
Then you miss a month or so. Now it’s going to be hard to explain. How much of your personal life will you have to expose to justify this pause in your productivity, your failure to take your own writing seriously?
After a while, it’s easier to crawl under the covers, pretend you never started, and tell yourself it never mattered anyway.
Writing requires courage.
It requires courage on so many levels… the will to ask yourself hard questions, the will to answer them. The drive to explore new terrain and wipe out and mess up and fall over and try again. That’s just to get words on paper (or a screen, no judgement). It doesn’t even cover putting those words in the world. To the public. To anyone who might want to read them and judge you without knowing a single thing about you.
So - thank you to the friends who ask me in whatever fashion about how my writing is going. I love that you care even if my answers are double-plus awkward.
And for those of you who aren’t sure how to answer the old “how’s your writing going?” Here’s a short list of pithy answers you can use if you need them:
One word at a time.
Slowly.
It seems to set it’s own pace.
What did I tell you I was writing?
It’s going somewhere.
All over the place.
Boldly forward where grammar fails to guide it.
Onward without heed to spelling or meaning.
It’s caught in a vocabulary vortex.
Keep writing, folks. Bravely.
Thanks for sharing Christine.
Thanks for the honesty. I was certain I was the only one to feel those feelings