Dear Heavy: Here's What Worked For Me in My Darkest Hours
Lit Salon on one concrete method that has helped me lurch forward from desolation into a creative project + the surprising power writing from nowhere to nowhere
Dear Jeannine,
It has been a hard month. A hard fall. A hard year. For me, and more so, for the world.
And somewhere inside all that hardness and heartbreak, I just stopped everything but the basics. Burned out, maybe?
Whatever it is, now here we are, the darkness and days spiraling in on themselves, the holiday season winding up, and I am just so tired. Even though I have always been a holiday person. I have a big family and I love the decorations and lights and remembering to be grateful and all the togetherness and food(!), but I can barely muster the energy to be excited this year.
I guess you’re probably wondering, what does all of this have to do with writing?
Well, I know that writing is the thing that keeps me awake in my own life. Through some of my hardest times, my ability to be engaged and stay engaged with a creative writing project has been the life raft, the spark I needed to push through. But now, as I look back, it seems like mere chance that I had writing projects to engage with in those harder moments. Projects that were consuming enough to keep me in them, despite everything that might have pulled me out of them.
Now, I find myself in a moment where the hard and the heavy are piling up and—I don’t have a single thing to hold fast to. It sounds dramatic, I know, but my arms feel like they are filled with sand every time I try to lift them to my keyboard to write. So, instead of writing, I scroll on my phone or eat an entire sleeve of Ritz crackers.
And neither the scrolling nor the crackers are what I need.
I just have no idea how to break out. I know that once I start and something catches it will feel easier and lighter and that creative energy will start to generate itself inside me, and help me to shift the heavy in my chest.
But how? How do I start? How do I get something to catch?
Thanks,
Heavy
Dear Heavy,
Oh, the Ritz crackers. I think we’ve all been there. Now that I can’t eat gluten, it’s even sadder, with rice thins or flax wafers.
Imagine that, if you will.
But in all seriousness, it has been heavy. Almost everyone I talk to these days is feeling it fully—so, first of all, just know, you are not alone. And I am afraid I don’t have a fix for this broken world—nothing that will stem the tide of violence and despair—though I’ve written about getting unstuck and/or writing through despair several times (like here to Why Bother, here to Stuck, here to Dried Up, here to Tired, and here to Hollow).
But for you, I have something different to say. A genuine concrete suggestion, one that has worked for me in my darkest hours, especially about five years ago when I was going through the most painful experience I’ve ever faced as a mother, more painful than my difficult divorce twenty years ago, which was as painful as I thought it might ever get for me, and more painful than my son’s addiction and recovery fifteen years after that, when he was in his early twenties, which I thought at the time simply had to be as painful as it might ever get for me. But what I endured five years ago was even more painful, in fact, than anything I’d previously imagined, even though now looking back I see that it was all a kind of predictable pain, planted decades ago even if it did not announce itself until I was fifty years old and my children were all in their twenties. By now, I am mostly healed (although the healing will likely go on forever, as happens with these things). But at the time, what was happening in my life was so darkly all-consuming that I couldn’t see how I could ever write again, ever care about writing again, even though writing has always been what has saved me from the worst horrors without and within.
It turns out, the solution was actually concrete and simple and I’d used it before, just never with such ferocious clarity of need. Here’s what worked for me. I hope it works for you, too: