Sometimes I cannot bring myself to write. Sometimes I cannot bring myself to write at all.
I sit at the chair with an empty mind and shake my leg and open and close a tab next to the Google Doc. Other times, my mind is full but only ever so full that there is no room to work, like a basement flooded.
I try to, as Joan Didion puts it, “turn to the literature” and reexamine my literary idols but their divination has forsaken me. I try to turn to music, but the notes and rhythms and words hijack my consciousness. I chase after inspiration like trying to catch wind in a net.
Hemingway once said that writing is like bleeding—when the creativity stops, does the heart stop too?
I love writing but I hate its process. Writing is fundamentally collecting, both physically and mentally. Before I sit, I need: one or more sixteen-point-nine fluid-ounce bottles of diet coke; ice-cold water in a bottle, not a glass; a desk that is sturdy; a chair that is not; over-the-ear closed-back headphones; and the loudest, harshest noise music possible. But more often than not, there’s an unknown part missing—ideas.
People always talk about themselves or others as if there’s some separation between mind and body and sometimes spirit, but I don’t think that’s true, I don’t think that’s true at all.
I feel the bleed of my mind transmute into the body and if I felt I had a spirit, the bleed would be there too. Inspiration has left and now the only sparks I feel are dizziness, like a sudden burst of noise, like microphone feedback.
The vertigo has gotten worse recently, but I have not had time to go to the doctor. My failures at writing dirty the whole bloody stream.
The root of my issue is self-evaluation.
I constantly judge what I’m writing while I’m working on it. I judge it even harsher after I’ve written it. The mental rubric is constantly shifting. I go to bed loving the work and I wake up hating it. I shift from fever to ice and back again. Into the rollercoaster, I fly so high and crash so low and I end up with vertigo and a sunburn.
All I want is to stop, but I can’t undo the straps. Tugging and scratching and screaming at them, my escape attempts hold no value. I used to think of self-evaluation as a monster I meet in the dark night while it stalks me, but I’ve realized that it’s more terrifying than that: there is no monster, there is only me. I am the one who holds the gavel.
Self-evaluation isn’t something I can just excise. It’s just as impossible to write without any self-evaluation as it is to write without devastatingly pervasive judgment.
Writing this makes me feel like such a hypocrite.
Quite often when tutoring at the UCWbL, I see brilliant writers with the same neuroses. I tell them to believe in themselves; I tell them their work is valuable; I tell them they are making good progress, and they always are!
But then a tsunami of guilt washes over me—I’m giving them advice I myself cannot follow. I assuage the pang of pain through a self-effacing joke, and the appointment moves on. Easier said than done is the understatement of the century.
This blog post offers more solidarity than solutions. I wish I had an aphorism or a clever turn of phrase, but I don’t. Still, the first step towards working through a problem is to recognize it.
Negative self-evaluation is still a major problem in my writing. I know that my art does not require pain, but I don’t know how to work without it. But one technique that has improved things is recognizing the stories that I tell myself.
I’ve made a rhetorical shift inside my head: I used to see every piece of writing as a test to be passed or failed. And if my writing failed the test, I failed the test.
Now, I recognize two things: first, the quality of my writing does not determine my worth as a person; second, any particular piece of work is not a test but instead another step on a journey.
But I think most important is hearing that we as writers are not alone in these feelings.
Self-evaluation is an inherently isolating narrative. It tells us that not only are we bad at writing, but we’re uniquely bad at writing, and this represents an equally unique defect within ourselves. This is not the case.
Every writer I’ve talked to feels struggles with these same evaluative forces. Only in community can we heal from these internal shearing forces. Writing alone is not healthy. We must eliminate the mental audience of one., and replace the single, destructive voice with a louder chorus of healing, supportive voices. And eventually, we will learn from each other’s example how we should treat ourselves. Only then can we truly heal.
Sometimes I cannot bring myself to write— and now, I realize that’s okay.