Some folks have responded to my “don’t force yourself to write” post with reasonable skepticism. The gist of these objections is: some things you have to force yourself to do. If you’re depressed, for instance (or even if you aren’t!) you may have to force yourself to eat, or bathe, or exercise, or tidy your apartment. You can’t wait to feel motivated or “ready” to do these necessary things or else they’ll never get done.
Yes. I agree completely. So let me clarify:
There’s self-care, and there’s self-punishment. With writing (as with anything) it’s the self-punishment you want to avoid.
So, how can you tell the difference?
Well, I can only speak for myself. But when I don’t have the energy for self-care, I still know (usually) that future-me will thank present-me for pushing through some momentary unpleasantness to take a walk or eat something. And once I’ve done the thing, I usually feel a minimal sense of accomplishment, at least, plus whatever physiological benefits I got from food and movement. I’m always glad I did it afterward; it’s just pushing through that initial resistance that’s painful and hard.
If writing is like that for you—if some initial reluctance and discomfort hold you back but then you’re heartily glad you did it once you get going—then a bit of gentle “forcing” might be called for. If writing is self-care for you, I encourage you to push through the resistance even when it’s not easy.
But if writing just makes you feel like shit before, during, and after, it’s not self-care. If all you’re doing by writing is training yourself to hate writing and hate yourself, then caring for yourself might mean not writing for a while.
Think of it this way: an athlete can tell the difference between pain they need to push through and pain that means something is wrong and they should stop. It’s harder to tell the difference when you’re in terrible pain all the time, but if you ask yourself seriously whether you’re doing something as an act of self-care or as a gesture of spite toward yourself, I think you’ll find that some part of you knows the answer. Depression makes it difficult to muster much compassion for yourself, but that’s the single most important thing you can do when you’re depressed.
So listen to your feelings and be honest with yourself. If you’re at that point where you can only use writing as another stick to beat yourself with, you should probably take a break.
This needn’t be all-or-nothing. You can, after all, learn how to write compassionately instead of self-critically. But take a cue from the athlete who feels a shooting pain and very prudently stops whatever they were doing until they know what’s going on. If you’ve got a “writing injury,” you may need some rehab. You may need to do some gentle exercises that stretch your writing muscles without putting any weight on the injury, as it were. But you should not expect yourself to run a marathon. Ignoring your pain and expecting yourself to function like a writer in perfect health is the very essence of self-punishment.
So, whether it’s from depression or anxiety or trauma or anything else—if you’ve got this knot of misery built up around writing that won’t go away, treat yourself like an injured athlete. Pushing through that kind of pain will just worsen the injury, so take the weight off and examine your injury with care. And ask yourself what might help you heal. Don’t look at other writers and wonder why you can’t be more like them—just treat your own wounds. Ask for help treating them. And above all, recognize that your wounds deserve to be treated and aren’t just a sign that you’re weak or untalented or “not a real writer.”
Our culture loves to idealize writers who somehow staggered through brilliant writing careers despite incredible psychic wounds. But for every Sexton or Hemingway, there are hundreds of writers you’ve never heard of because they got pulled under the waves before they could write anything good. Hemingway might have had a certain animal toughness they lacked, but was he “better”? We’ll never know, will we? The ability to write while systematically destroying yourself should not be the only quality that gets rewarded in a writer. You don’t have to be that kind of writer. There are other ways to be.
So, writers, it’s okay to take care of yourself. In fact, you gotta. And that means learning the difference between temporary discomfort and serious, damaging pain. Because believe it or not, there is a difference. I wish I’d learned that sooner!
I would add that during such times, it’s okay to “kinda” write. I suffer from SAD and in winter NOTHING hurts me more than “I want to release a new chapter….but writing sucks right now.”
So you know what I do?
Pull up that document, read the previous subchapter, and do something else. When an idea comes to me, I type it.
I’ve gotten up to two pages in a night by doing this. There’s no consequence if I get only two sentences and delete them both the next day, but ooooh does it feel awesome when I get more and am able to keep it–and either way I am TRYING, and for me, with myself, trying counts for a lot.
I love this! Working on a story doesn’t have to be this big dramatic event where you sit down and “get shit done.” It can happen incrementally, just you letting the story keep you company as you do other things, and checking in on it whenever you like.
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