How writing became hard

Last week, I resigned from my job. I will be taking an extended sabbatical.

After grinding it out in my 20s, I burned out. One of my main goals during this sabbatical is to reconnect with the things that made me feel alive when I was younger, writing being #1.

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I remember wanting to hide. My high school English teacher pulled out my essay and started reading it... in front of the whole class.

She said that she’d enjoyed my written assignment and wanted to share it with the class. Though a bit embarrassed by the spotlight, I felt grateful and proud. Writing was fun and a big part of my identity.

Fourteen years later, that memory feels like a distant dream from an alternate reality.

After high school, I enrolled in engineering school and stopped writing creatively almost entirely. I wasn’t able to make time as responsibilities racked up and my studies took a very technical route.

And now, for the past few years, I've had the worst writer's block of my life.

Every time I sit down to write, it feels as if literal concrete has been poured onto my brain and I just feel stuck. What concerns me is not just that this happens, which I understand is normal for creatives, but for how long it’s happened.

In fact, this whole essay is a desperate last-effort attempt to get through the writer's block by reflecting a light back on it instead of fighting it. It seems to be working… for now.

So what went wrong?

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Mistake #1: I stopped reading fiction.

As a young writer, reading fiction used to be rocket fuel for my creativity.

Fiction allowed me to suspend my disbelief and venture out into the unknown equipped with a wondrous "what if?" instead of a skeptical "how could it?". It allowed me to turn off the skeptical part of my brain - things were less about being right, and more about just being.

Over the years though, I began seeing fiction as “not practical” and an indulgent waste of time.

The Wall Street Journal, dry self-help books, and rote research papers began to slowly replace the island murder mysteries, magical time-traveling tree houses, and trumpet-playing swans of years past.

But there’s a hidden cost to eschewing fiction like this. In the pop-neuroscience book Keep Your Brain Alive, authors Lawrence Katz and Rubin Manning point to research studies that demonstrate that the brain works through a “use-it-or-lose-it” principle. They show that experiencing novelty produces chemicals called neurotrophins in the brain, which both create new synaptic connections and strengthen existing ones. They even title a section in the book “Routines Can be Brain-Deading.”

By being overly analytical and not balancing that out with a healthy dose of fiction, we perhaps risk atrophying our mental faculties of imagination, creativity and wonder. Imagine trying to write without any of those three!

Mistake #2: I let fearful perfectionism replace playful experimentation.

Writing on the internet can feel daunting. Especially with cancel culture and the idea of a permanent record. Taking a small risk in a class as a student is way different than putting something online for the whole world to see (future employers, extended family, and even generations to come).

In my 20s I decided to go the risk-averse route. I didn’t want to do anything that could, in any way, risk my budding professional career or invite judgment at internet-scale.

I am slowly realizing the cost of these limiting beliefs. By aiming to “be perfect” before showing up on the internet, I am robbing myself of the opportunity to grow with the internet.

I don’t want to dismiss the fear though, there is some valid basis for them. But I think the only way through the fear is to have faith. Faith that the benefits of writing online outweigh the risks.

I am coming to realize that by sharing our vulnerable, in-progress selves, we provide a valuable service to those one step away from us who are in desperate need of a role model that is relatable and real, not grand and unreachable.

Revealing ourselves as imperfect collectively improves the mental health of the whole world.

Mistake #3: I took it all too seriously.

In school, I picked up the habit of writing through simple — almost childish — prompts: what my favorite pizza topping was, if I could invent my own animal what would it be, describing an imaginary friend, etc. As an adult, these prompts feel silly, but I think discounting them as such is a disservice to their effectiveness.

To get back in the habit of writing, it’s totally fine to write about these sorts of things. They’re probably the remedy to writer’s block that I seek. Not everything has to strive to be a Pulitzer-prize winning exposé, a comprehensive research thesis, or a grand unified theory of everything.

It’s time to loosen up the proverbial tie, get a little messy, and have fun again.

A new practice.

I’m excited to take another stab at building up my writing muscle. Thanks for reading — more to come.