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So I know you’re not supposed to say things like this, but…I stopped writing last year and it was one of the best things I’ve done for myself in a long time. I’m not advocating it for everyone, but it has been incredibly freeing.
Also, let me say that I don’t see this as a necessarily permanent thing. Maybe a pause? But my relationship with writing had become, dare I say, toxic and it needed to be redefined.
Really, the key wasn’t in stopping writing — I’ve been through periods like that before — but in stopping myself from expecting or pushing myself to write. Ending the persistent and often cruel voice that constantly harangued me, and yet was me.
It’s only now that I realized that I had reached the point where I rarely enjoyed free time because if I didn’t use it to write, it felt wasted, or I felt like a failure. So I was constantly frustrated.
And I didn’t enjoy writing any more. It felt like something I owed someone. Ostensibly me, but a me that felt external, someone I no longer identified with.
That voice served a purpose at one point. When I was starting to get serious, and reaching for greater accomplishments, it helped propel me. It helped me to finish things and work harder and keep at it. But while I changed along the way, the voice never really did.
So I am somehow happier now, and more content. I feel more present in my own life, strangely. I’ve reclaimed a large part of my mind back. And all that creativity and those ideas have been finding their way out in other places.
I expect that I will write again, but I hope that it’s because I am so taken by an idea that I have to do it, and will be happy doing it, and not because I “should” or because I’m measuring myself against someone else and their accomplishments.
And I just want to add that the main reason I put all of this out here is just to say that the conventional wisdom — that you have to write every day, that x, y, or z make you a writer, whatever — doesn’t necessarily work for everyone at all times.
