How my relationship with writing has changed

Hello friend!

It's been a long while, but I am, in fact, still writing. I've written at least four or five posts that were meant to go live last year, but all of them felt like the vague shape of something rather than what I actually wanted to say.

This has been happening a lot. I'm doing the physical act of writing. I'm hitting my deadlines (which is, actually, a minor miracle). I'm even content while I'm creating for the most part. But something has felt off anyway, and my fear, for a long time, was that I was just maybe not supposed to be writing anymore. Maybe I'd run out of things to say?

One of the first books I finished early this year was The Creative Act, which held a lot of wisdom that personally hit home for me. It held a lot of complementary views as The Artist's Way, but it shifted my relationship with writing in a very fundamental way. I've never looked at writing as an entity with which I could have a relationship. Writing was a thing I did because I've always had to do it. It felt a bit like if I stopped writing, I would stop breathing.

I'm not really sure when that changed. I suspect that it has been changing gradually over the last couple of years. I harp a lot about ADHD and getting the correct treatment, but being on meds has genuinely saved my life, and, I think, changed my relationship with writing forever, too.

The relationship I had with writing prior to getting the proper diagnosis and treatment was a survivalist relationship. Writing was medicine. I had to engross myself in it because there was no other (healthier) way for me to really cope with the reality of constantly struggling in life. Boy, even that sentence was difficult to write. I was very much in denial of that struggle, too, because that's how survival works.

Now on the other side of no longer gasping for metaphorical air, I'm recognizing how many of these subconscious habits were really self-medicating techniques. (Did you know that saying, "Coffee does not actually make me feel more awake but helps me concentrate better" is not a universal experience? Because that was news to me.) Why it has taken me over two years to realize that writing may be one of these habits is beyond me.

But something has changed. I stopped writing quite so frequently, and yet, there were no negative consequences. I spent less and less time at my chair and way more of it outside, and doing things I really liked doing. Going to plays. Going on wandering walks. Traveling to new countries. Buying a little treat at the grocery store. Saying yes to a friend on a Friday night on a whim (whereas previously, this would have resulted in a meltdown). Embroidering pillowcases the way my grandmother taught me. And lots and lots of reading books I wanted to read simply because I was curious about them.

After a little while I recognized the pattern here, too. This was all ... fun. Unstructured. It was relaxing. None of that really fit the writing bill. Wasn't writing a disciplined planned thing that I did at least five times a week for at least fifteen minutes a day?

A little voice in my head whispered, "Why does it have to be?" and I owe everything to that little chaos gremlin. (Actually, I owe a lot more than this to said gremlin, but that's another topic for another day.)

I've spent my entire writing life reading others' advice about how to do it. I've been convinced, somehow, that there's a way. And you know what? I'll give it to my youthful, enthusiastic self: there is a right way, technically. But the caveat is that I am never really going to find the exact right technique for me anywhere in a book. I maintain that it is important to at least listen to seasoned writers' advice on writing, especially in a technical sense, but they are not necessarily gospel, either.

Until pretty recently, I didn't consciously have the words to know why that was true, but I think I've finally grasped it: it's because any equation of being a successful writer includes the writer themselves. None of the techniques really matter if they're not curated to the person doing the writing.

Why did I miss this for so long, though?

The Creative Act talks through how art is a story told in time. Lived experiences are molded and forged into art, and all art tells a story. (Everything is soup!) And the part I've been missing is how my work is about my story. I've downplayed this story for much of my life. "It isn't that bad," I would always say with a bright, optimistic smile, and there's some truth to that. I am deeply grateful for my personal and how it's shaped. It could have been so, so much worse.

But this is the tell-tale words of a survivor, isn't it? Surviving something doesn't automatically make the narrative. And there are parts of said narrative that hurt, parts that are ugly, and parts that are extremely to talk about. You know, like any sort of life. This is, I think, what it means to be alive and human.

Writing saved my life in every way it knew how, but the truth is that I no longer need saving. I am ready to live my life outside of it. But just because someone survives with you through a rough time doesn't mean you have to stop having a relationship with them after the survival is over. It just means that this relationship has to change.

I have absolutely no idea what my relationship with writing will look like going forward, but I am sure of one thing: it will not be out of obligation or need. It will be something I want to do, and only if I want to keep doing it. That may change one day, but for now, I'm very grateful that I can meet writing on an even footing, as a healthier person who gets to explore new techniques, new stories, and new mediums for which to tell those stories.

But for now, I'm letting myself enjoy that feeling of infinite possibility right at the beginning of exploring something novel.

Thanks as always for reading,

Yasi