The Month I Didn’t Write
November is usually a ridiculously productive month for me as a writer. I participate in NaNoWriMo more often than not, and even in the years I’m not Nanoing though, I find myself writing more. The new chill in the air keeps me inside on my laptop, and the constant updates from friends writing their 50,000 words keep me motivated.
This year, things were different. The depression that I generally cope so well with started to take on new shapes, the exhausting apathy sneaking in through the cracks. By the first of November, I had stopped writing completely.
It’s not like I filled up my days with anything else. Those thirty minute intervals I’ve carved out in my day are still there, and now they drag out into hours of staring at blank word documents.
The worst part? I have no idea how to talk about it.
This year I’ve concentrated so hard on “legitimizing” myself as a writer. I’ve involved myself in physical and online communities, I’ve made connections, I’ve started a ‘brand’. Admitting that I was too depressed to actually write doesn’t really seem to factor into that brand.
My apathy also started to get very specific. I’ve written multiple blog posts over the past month, including a few that I think are some of my best. I still tweet and retweet, even posting excerpts from my drafts and pictures of the marked up pages I was editing. I couldn’t write a single story though. Class deadlines passed me by without so much as an e-mail to the professor about my situation. I started dodging thesis meetings and craft workshops.
My heart isn’t in it.
Where’d it go?
I’m still doing research, still going to readings and asking questions. Everything looks right. But I can’t write? The only thing that brings real purpose to my days; the thing I do to escape the rest of my life. And now, it has escaped me.
As writers, I think we face this more often than any of us care to admit. The myth of “writers block” helps keep us from thinking too much about it. We ignore the fact that we are, indeed, burning out. All the books, all the scholars, everything I know says that I should just sit down and write. “A paragraph a day will get you a novel”.
What about when you just can’t, though?
How do you find the tenderness to allow yourself to stop writing, collect yourself, and begin again on your own terms. How do you love writing, when you don’t feel like your heart can love anything.
I’m not sure yet, but I’m ready to begin trying.
I’m ready to talk.
Are you?
