Writing Practice as the Stages of Grief
or, trying to write my way toward acceptance and grace
CW: This Substack will discuss mental + physical health and how it can impact creativity and writing practice. If that’s not your jam, feel free to sit this one out.
Dear Friends,
My desire to tell my truth about my writing process is often at odds with my desire to stay a fictionist. What I mean by this is that part of my impulse behind the “Miscellaneous Wonders” newsletter is to make the writing and publishing process less agonizing, more transparent, and do what I can to help people feel a little less like outsiders as they traverse this strange literary landscape. But I want to do so as someone who prefers to write poetry and fiction—not nonfiction. It’s a tricky balance for me though as someone who tries to keep my private day-to-day life separate from the lived experiences as a writer that I aim to share with the public. However, I’ve realized I cannot fully impart the lesson I want to impart without being honest about myself with you all, so I’m going to be fully honest today.
What I want to do here today is try to dispel some notions of genius—of the continuous capitalist “grind” mindset. I want to revisit the idea of the “iceberg illusion” I talked about early this spring. In my experience, while social media allows us to stay connected to one another, it can also exacerbate ideas about success and productivity in a way that often erases disability and neurodiversity and the overall obligations of daily life.
Maybe, to work our way toward that idea, we can start with a metaphor. I choose photography, since it’s close to my heart.
When I was in photography school many years ago, we talked about middle gray often. The idea of middle gray is that it’s halfway between black and white. In photography, we say that middle gray is 18% reflectance across the visible spectrum of light. There’s no need for us to get that technical, though.
I’ve had a fondness for that term because it feels like the place I spend most of my days. It’s a term I use in therapy often as well as I try to verbalize the story of my body in an attempt for someone else to make sense of it, to tell it back to me in a way that might build a path toward wellness.
To get straight to the point: I live with something called dysthymia—or if you want something that sounds less like a Victorian pseudo-disease à la a case of the vapours—then we could go with the more contemporary “persistent depressive disorder.” What this means is I don’t usually have high-highs or low-lows. I don’t have bouts of crying and sadness for the same reason I don’t have bouts of joy and euphoria. I don’t have hypomanic episodes for the same reason I don’t experience suicidal ideation. If anything, my one peculiar outlier in the laundry list of depressive symptoms is that I have a deviant amount of hope. Maybe it’s my artist soul that allows me to continue to dream inside the dark.
This hope is often connected to my writing practice. There is a part of my brain that feels analytical and acute—who aspires to be the type of writer who can write every day for 8 hours—who dreams of being invigorated and focused. The type of writer who can come up with a concept, follow it through from A-to-Z, immaculately edit it, and then move onto the next manuscript. I’ve dreamed of being a flawless workhorse, partially because I’ve [falsely] perceived other people in the writing community as flawless workhorses.
Unfortunately, even though there is a part of my mind that recognizes and knows these are unrealistic ideals, my mental health issues resist and persist. I have learned to navigate this middle gray, to become an expert at it, but that doesn’t mean I can always outwit or outwile it.
Even though I often experience a frustration from the disconnect between what I want to accomplish and the limits of my body, I also want to acknowledge and hold space for those days when I am out of spoons and just cannot create. I want to hold space for the moments when I’ve reached burn-out and have zero interest in reading or writing. I want to honor these moments because to honor these moments pushes back against the illusion that to be a writer one must be nondisabled, neurotypical, be able to maintain a grind mindset, embody the perfect workaholic personality, read every new book that comes out every Tuesday, and so on.
And to discuss all of these things, there is nothing more pernicious in creative writing culture than the oft-repeated phrase “Write every day.” So let’s pivot over there for a minute.
Years ago, I was working at a non-profit with a writer, who for many reasons I consider a mentor. One day we were making water-cooler talk about the practice of writing, and I expressed a sort of guilt and self-defeat about [my lack of] daily writing. I said something to the extent of, “I know I should be writing every day…” and this writer carefully interjected with “Why?”
It was a damned good question, and one I had never considered before. Why, indeed? I was a lot younger then—still coming into my own style and voice—and I hadn’t really filtered out all those endlessly repeated adages about “show don’t tell,” “kill your darlings,” “write what you know,” “stick to the basics with dialog tags,” and of course: “write every day.”
Only a few years out of my undergraduate studies, I’d been in at least half-a-dozen workshop groups since I was a teenager, and I had felt empowered by memorizing golden rules. It made me feel like an insider to the workshop—and an alum of it. It felt good to have done the homework, to have served my hours, to be part of something beyond complete amateurism. I was still in my absorption years, when I wasn’t quite sure how to cleave and rupture ideas that were not beneficial (or were downright harmful) to my writing practice. What this writer gifted me that day was a very important question, which in turn was the right to refuse the absolute truths of the workshop.
Don’t get me wrong: I do believe there are some kernels of truth in the golden rules of writing. There is value in ritual and endurance and persistence and practice and goal-setting. But we all have different bodies & brains & souls, which means our writing and its own processes can be quite different. This is also why when I see someone confidently positioning themselves as an authority and making some absolutist qualifying statement about writing (when really they’re speaking of their own tastes) that my eye begins to twitch a little.
This is all to say: fuck writing every day.
These days, every bit of oft-repeated writing advice lobbed at young and/or emerging writers has been dissected, deconstructed, rebuked, and remixed—so I don’t believe I’m saying anything new by tackling one of these now. But I also know there are those of you out there who haven’t quite given yourself permission to give in to your wants and your needs. It takes a while to get there. So while I say just a little bit more on this, I hope you can think of some absolute truths you’ve internalized that are counter-productive to your own writing practice and ask if you truly need them to thrive.
Okay, pivoting back to the topic of depression for a moment (if this newsletter post sounds like two or three different essays in one, that’s because it is).
I’ve been trying to write something about writing practice and disability and mental health since June, and I’ve begun a few different attempts on this topic that I’ve failed to finish. I’ve failed to finish them because on top of my regularly scheduled dysthymia I received an interjection of a major depressive episode (yes, people can experience both!). I don’t normally experience major depression, but when I do it looks like 1) withdrawal 2) isolation 3) atrophy and 4) sleeping the majority of the day. There were multiple days across the past 8 weeks that I spent around 18-20 hours in bed.
Thankfully, I come to you today as someone who is (hopefully) on the other side of all that (for now). I am also fortunate to have a really good insurance plan through my graduate studies that has connected me to many healthcare professionals who are working to keep me alive and well.
Obviously, though, there are days when something gets in the way. I don’t know about you all, but I have an editorial voice within me that helps to manage my creativity. And when I experience a depressive episode, the voice becomes very frenzied and existential. It’s not necessarily the cruelest voice, but it is one that shouts from the jail cell of my depression, “You’ve done nothing today! The hours are ticking by! You’ve spent X many hours awake and you haven’t accomplished anything! Get out of bed! Do something! You’re ruining a day! Opportunities are passing by! You’re wasting your time on this planet!” (Okay, maybe it is a little cruel…). And when that voice fails to overcome the depression, it often makes me spiral downward more.
In the past week or so, I’ve noticed a shift in the voice though as I’ve actively tried to put into practice treating myself with grace (thanks, CBT). If this was one of the ‘stages of grief,’ we might call this acceptance. So as I pivot one final time to some takeaways, I hope you might find something in all of this mess that speaks to you and allows you to give yourself some grace as well.
Here are some takeaways that I hope you can embrace if you need to, and perhaps even turn the language into a mantra if that’s needed for you:
It’s okay not to “write every day.” We are all on our own timelines. Some of us are actively managing our health and wellness; some of us are caregivers to children, lovers, and/or family members; some of us have extremely taxing jobs or careers that leave us depleted. Instead of wishing you were some other type of writer or reader or creative, try to make peace with what you have on your plate. Try to make writing dates with yourself if you’d like to create, but also practice being kind to yourself if those dates get canceled.
As an extension of that, take ownership of the body that you have. Think of your body not as something that limits of you, but something that you are living in and something you are continuously learning to negotiate. Sometimes, these negotiations might get in the way of goals, but try to treat yourself with compassion. Something that I often feel doesn’t get talked about when it comes to disability is just how much labor self-advocacy is. To manage my internist, immunologist, pulmonologist, otolaryngologist, pain specialist, gastroenterologist, dermatologist, therapists, psychiatrist, physical therapists and beyond is a part-time job. Doctor appointments alone can take up the space of an entire day and leave someone too out of spoons to create.
If you notice having an unkind voice in your head, try to speak to those thoughts, to challenge them, even if it means talking out loud to yourself. For example: instead of letting my existential-you’re-wasting-an-entire-day voice take over, I might try to reframe it to acknowledge my depression instead of resisting it. I might make smaller goals for that day. No, I’m probably not going to work on my novel today, but maybe I can get out of bed and get a glass of water, hydrate, take a shower… Meet yourself where you are. Don’t agonize over the person you are not in this current moment in time.
Even though much of this newsletter is focused on mental health, also feel free to give yourself permission to reject ‘writing advice’ that isn’t helpful for your writing practice. Give yourself to mute people on social media (even people you adore!) if their feeds are making you doomscroll and/or feel bad about yourself. Give yourself permission to take a social media break if that’s what you need.
Please also give yourself compassion if your reality does not match your ideals. When I planned out my summer, I planned out a ton of reading and writing during a less-strenuous period when I’m not teaching or actively in semester-long sprints. Unfortunately, that major depression episode had other plans for me. I’m trying not to dwell on a summer that was lost, but trying to acknowledge and meet my mental health where it is at and where it has been. Acceptance over mourning.
If this all sounds like I’m pushing some of my takeaways from therapy onto you all, well, maybe I am, but this newsletter isn’t just writing advice—it’s a mirror to my own daily life and what I am going through. And I know some of you have noticed I haven’t been keeping the newsletter up this summer. And if I were to present myself as someone busy or distracted or productive or perfect, not only would that be a lie—it would be antithetical to the type of writer and author and human that I am.
Mostly, when it comes to mental health, I take a joke-y attitude, but for once I want to be absolutely sincere and honest, because without this sincerity we cannot work to destigmatize depression and the ways it can impact one’s own creative practice.
I hope you all can find a voice to speak to anything that has been challenging your own relationship with creative writing or artistic practice lately—and find a way to meet yourself with compassion, acceptance, and the kindness that you deserve.
Until next time,
JD
Thank you so much for this, I am chronically ill and a writer and this made me feel so much less lonely