How I started writing again

Back from the deep dark forest

Hushing myself: A writer’s block

When I do not write, it is a kind of self-erasure, maybe even self-hatred. Do my words matter? No, I think. They aren’t even good. The world is too much. Who would listen? What is the point of screaming into the void?

I did not write for several years, from 2020 until the summer of 2024. The cessation began with the pandemic. March 2020 felt like a zombie apocalypse; it was an all-hands-on-deck call to action, a fight between life and death. The pandemic also triggered my OCD and germaphobia. Just a couple of weeks prior to the shutdown, I hosted a bee class at my home. (I shudder at the thought now; my germaphobia and OCD have very much increased, as have my aversion to crowds). The lockdown ended within a few weeks. The vaccine came to fruition about a year later.

I remained in my personal lockdown.

They say even when you don’t write, you can be writing. The most common form of this writing-while-not-writing is reading. When reading, you are actively constructing meaning in your mind, and Stephen King has said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

But I must confess: I barely did even that. Self-loathing, too, prevented me from reading.

Other writers kept writing. I know because I saw the books in the bookstore in the “New Fiction” and “New Nonfiction” categories. Friends wrote them; they were terrific and made me hate myself even more. I switched to foreign literature to have no personal connection to the writer. I switched to the classics, writers who were long gone from this world. I stopped reading altogether.

I did write some. It's not anything with a conscious narrative or structure, though. I wrote in my journal, but while I used to fill six to twelve notebooks each year, I found myself filling only two or three notebooks per year. Over two years, I wrote three drafts of a book proposal—a memoir about my urban farm. Each attempt felt less passionate. It was like lighting a fire in a drafty fireplace on wet wood; the fire never caught. I gave up writing the book proposal. More self-loathing.

I published nothing from 2021 to 2024. No essays. No fiction. No book reviews. The last published thing was in my Backyard Politics column at the now-defunct Catapult.

The pandemic and beyond: Locking myself away

Meanwhile, the world emerged from lockdown. The first vaccines and boosters came out. People still died, but not as many. The mask requirements went away.

I formed a little game in my brain when there were mask requirements. I imagined Covid as a zombie’s kiss and that the mask protected us from becoming a zombie. Or that Covid was a way that aliens tagged each of us. Those who got Covid would be taken by aliens when they came. It was the anti-rapture. It was the goal to stay safe. I realize as I type this, I sound absolutely bonkers.

But it is one reason that I remained masking, even as others frolicked with naked faces at concerts and supermarkets and gatherings, air hitting their bare chins. The reality is that Covid is not great for an immunocompromised person like me. The fact is that perfectly healthy non-immunocompromised friends got long Covid and suffer to this day, years later. Maybe my zombie and alien story isn’t real. But the ethos of it is, at least to me.

Locking myself away had its price. For four years, I avoided Covid. But I did not write. I barely read.

My long break from writing: Purity and germaphobia

My germaphobia is a problem. Very much a problem in myriad ways.

I’ve managed my germaphobia away in the past through various means. This time, I did it by equating germaphobia to purity culture. I do not, for the record, like purity culture, which is fear-based and black-and-white and adjacent to white supremacy and so much more. Thus, I tried to evil-ify my germaphobia by equating it to such mindsets.

Germaphobia is a desire to sanitize. But writing is not about purifying. Writing is not black and white. It is living in the gray and investigating muddy waters (which a germaphobe would never enter without excessive protective equipment).

The pandemic made the world black and white to me. You have Covid, or you do not. You mask, or you do not. Even the politics of the world bifurcated society into “maskers” vs “anti-maskers.”

The nuance is gone.

The in-between, though, is where stories reside.

By locking myself away, I’d barred myself from the in-between. But I did not know that at the time.

All I knew was that I could not write. By mid-2024, I was struggling to write again, this time with more desperation. The desire was there. Picture a car stuck in a ditch, engine revving. But the self-loathing wouldn’t go away.

The mindset coach (not really a book doctor)

Have you ever watched Stranger Than Fiction? In the movie, Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) is a Famous Writer who suffers from writer’s block. Karen’s publisher sends Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) to help her finish her next book. Penny introduces herself as an assistant with the same skills as a secretary and yet is also a book doctor. (This is NOT realistic. I do not know of any publishing house with such a role or person on staff).

Is there someone who can gently (or not so gently) coach you towards writing again?

But then such a person made herself known.

A friend of mine—Justina Phoon—started a mindset coaching business called Growth Impact. She’s not quite a career coach; she calls herself a “growth strategy coach” who focuses on helping people with both professional and personal growth. She’s told me, “The growth I focus on is both professional and personal as work is so much a part of our identity.”

While she specializes in corporate clients, I signed up for sessions with her. And she gladly took me in.

She asked what my goal was.

Of course, my first statement was evasive. I offered a very safe and business-oriented goal: “I want to work on refining my personal brand.”

It wasn’t what I needed most, even though I did need it. What I needed most and wanted most was to write again without thinking I was full of shit with every click of the keyboard. To not give a shit what other people thought. To be true to myself in my writing.

Over the next couple months, Justina worked with me, beginning with where I was most satisfied with my life and where I wanted more satisfaction (and I got to nickname/title our sessions, which was nice for a writer).

In the first session alone, I realized that while I ranked my home space high in satisfaction, I had no room to write. I have a guest room no one visits (read: my ongoing personal lockdown) but no studio for my writing.

That week, following my first session, I asked my partner to help me take apart the bed and shlep the mattress down for curbside city pickup. By the next week, that room was still very much a mess (I wanted to turn it into both a quilting and writing studio), but the bed was gone and it already felt like an office.

Yes, it always gets messier before it gets neater.

Over the next few weeks, I continued to organize the office until it felt like my own space. For the first time in years, I wrote at an actual desk. It was where I wrote my substack post on surviving that broke the block.

It is a north-facing room. (I love writing in north-facing rooms because they have less direct light). While it may feel odd to share quilting and writing in the same space, the fabrics are beautiful and inspire me.

Here is a picture of the room from the vantage point of the fake mid-century lounger chair (and yes, I have a desk, too).

While this was all happening, Justina took me through exercises that helped me get to the root of my fears and what I wanted to move towards. To what mattered and what did not. To identify what it feels like to write well. To channel positivity and celebrate successes. To crystalize my desire.

It was work on my part. I had to dig deep.

Until I finally found the delight in writing again.

Growth Impact: Husband with earned joy

These are the words I came up with to describe myself in those brand discussions: earned joy, healer, giver. “Earned joy” might be a term that befuddles folks, but I feel like my life is full of earned joy. It’s not just fleeting joy, but the kind of joy that you’ve fought to attain—joy with an awareness of darkness. Joy with a rearview mirror.

I also see myself as a “husband,” in that I nurture, heal, and give what I can.

What do you think? LOL.

It’s been a few months since my discussions with Justina’s Growth Mindset Coaching Program. I’ve not yet begun to execute my brand (though I’m having fun generating color palettes on Coolors), but I am writing again, including this Substack.

For me, writer’s block is the outcome of self-tyranny. Whenever I am overly demanding of myself or a tyrant to my characters, my narrative freezes. I had not realized how much of a tyrant I had become over my own life.

And yes, I’m cry-laughing at overcoming my struggle. I’ve gotten up on my feet just in time for fascism.