When I stopped writing the novel I had been working on since March—the novel that was halfway done, the novel that had given me purpose and structure when I was unemployed and living in my childhood home— my days collapsed a little, lost their shine and shape.
I had made the decision to stop late one night as I was walking the streets near my house. I had just hung up on my Mom because I was so anxious I couldn't talk, I needed to move and cry and be somewhere that was not my room.
As I walked in the cool August air, I realized that the bulk of my anxiety came from the novel and the word counts I had to meet each week. I had started writing it in March, when I lost my job and moved back home with my parents. Later, I was accepted into a program through Georgetown, where a cohort of authors would publish their first novels in under a year. I was set to publish in April of 2021.
As I walked that night, I saw the pattern that had emerged in my days: I would wake up and start doing the things I needed or wanted to do—like go for a run, make breakfast, call my Mom—and the entire time a voice in my head would tell me how I should be writing, how everything else was taking up my writing time.
I wanted to write in my journal and then I would think: no, you don't have time, open up your computer and write the next chapter. And even when I was writing, the voice would tell me that I hadn't written enough.
(This reminds me of some of my time in college, when I could only go to bed if I had finished every single assignment. My mind can become so scary sometimes.)
As I walked, my stomach tightened and got all cold—which my therapist has helped me to identify as the primary physical sign of anxiety for me—and I knew I needed to stop writing the novel. I needed to get my mornings back, I needed to release the anxiety that was taking over / holding me tighter and tighter.
I stopped writing completely for ten days. I went on runs and cooked and went to work, but I felt I had lost some sort of gravity, some version of purpose. My heart felt a little more fragile and lost.
I knew I needed to write again, but I didn't know where to start. I didn't want to simply journal—I had been doing that for my whole life and something told me that the publicity and structure of the novel had helped me take myself seriously.
I wanted to write something that would someday be read.
And then, on the eleventh day of not writing, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. I was so anxious I couldn’t sleep. I made tea and as I stood in my room, looking out the dark window, deciding what to do with my jumping jittering mind—I told myself to start typing.
I opened up a Google Doc and titled it "blog / thoughts / lifelight."
I wrote about the voices in my head, I tried to capture the way my heartbeat made me feel, how my focus shifted and jumped around like a monkey, a mosquito. I wrote about how I missed Ellie (my novel's main character) and also how forcing myself to meet a word count every morning had felt like a narrowing, pinching way to treat time.
And every time I opened up this Google Doc, every time I started typing and turned a few thoughts into phrases, every time I allowed myself to write a phrase like "lifelight," I would think yes, that's it, that's how I'm feeling and what that thing is. That's the word for it. I captured it—something.
I felt better after writing. A little more settled, a little more grounded. I felt heavier, less swayed; more present and proud.
I realized I needed writing, just not in the form of a novel. The novel was taking me away from my life, which was what I really wanted to write about. I wanted to unpack my mind, my feelings, my unfelt anger and my confusion. I wanted to write and affirm myself, surprise myself, hold myself.
So here’s to the journey, here’s to stopping something (something that was well-respected, something people told me not to stop) and starting something else (something that kept speaking to me, a Google Doc that said yes to every idea and feeling I had).
Here's to making it, whatever that means for me and you. I've decided that this is a version of making it. Right here. Making my words find their way to you, reader, somewhere.
Here’s to hoping my family and Facebook friends share this with someone else, post it, tell their friend about it on a walk on Wednesday. Here’s to hoping my words find some resonance, some place to sit, in your heart. I hope my posts help me each day, I hope they help me find purpose and pride, I hope they ground and hold me, and I hope that I see that that is me, holding myself.
I hope (I'm being repetitive, but no verb quite captures hope the way hoping does) my words connect with you, somehow, in any way. And I hope they provide some balm of comfort and affirmation, some mirror that says: I too am lost, and thinking and feeling a lot, and this is where I’m at.
I hope you feel seen, and I hope I do too.
Journal prompts / thought experiments inspired by this post:
(These will be appearing at the end of each post as an invitation to you to pause and ponder, to join me in writing and unpacking)
How do you affirm / surprise / hold yourself?
What's your favorite verb?
Do you know the Seamus Heaney line I'm thinking of about "quicken me all into verb, pure verb" ? (If not, here.)
What do you want to stop? And start?
How and when do you feel seen?