Recovering from Writer’s Block
I’ve never left writing in the dark. Or rather, it’s never left me in the dark.
Call it whatever you want: major creator’s block, burnout, boredom, wellness fatigue (more on this later)…
I hadn’t written a word on Medium in 5 months.
Until today.
Like many hobbies that I’ve entertained, many of the things I take up with too much passion tend to trickle away from me until the flame is extinct — I could write a novel about this.
I could also a novel about how the weighted blanket of darkness cloaks over me in the wintertime, sapping all the joy and creative energy I may have. And how it fragilizes my resilience and makes it near impossible to pick myself up after even the slightest denials. And inevitably, how it whispers over my shoulder that I’m a liar and cheat for writing about seasonal blues when I couldn’t even handle them myself; or how to get over your fear of failure when I deny fearing it myself — to the point I want to throw it all away and give up.
Except the thing is, I’ve never left writing in the dark. Or rather, it’s never left me in the dark.
Without calling myself a writer, I can easily say writing has carried me throughout my pre-teen years all the long way until today. Now, the only difference is instead of using it to reorganize my emotions, I can use it to create (and to make passive income).
With a persistence that continues to impress me, despite my slump, I’ve managed to sustain all client work without fail. It’s as if only my creative work was affected, suffered from the critic that inevitably comes with putting your writing out into the world (and the most severe critic of them all: myself).
Yet, despite these challenges that I am certain all writers go through, I’ve watched so many of the ones I admire — Adrian Drew, Matt Lillywhite, Yael Wolfe, Matilda Swinney, Jordan Gross to name only a few — flourish into growing incredible projects while I’ve been paralyzed by my own thoughts and fears.
