Writers, Take Care of Yourselves This Year
[image description: A wood desk with a leafy trailing plant, a notebook open to a blank page, and a mug that says “go get ‘em.”]
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I realized that last week after I shared the best writing advice I have that some people may have read “hustle culture” into that given that I framed the advice in terms of New Year’s Resolutions. Hustle culture is pervasive––this idea that we must work so hard that we break down and burn out in the hopes of achieving our dreams. That’s no way to do things; trust me, I know. And I understand why people are apprehensive about anything approaching toxic hustle culture, especially given that we’re in year three of the pandemic and things seem bleak.
Writing occupies a strange space for me. It is both the cause of a number of my mental maladies, as well as the antidote. Writing helps my mental health, but if I write too much or put too much pressure on myself, it can send me into a spiral of anxiety and depression.
I imagine I’m not the only one who feels this way, and I admit that it took me an absurdly long time to figure out that my mental health and well-being matters more than the output of my work. I have to take care of myself in order to live and to be able to write. If I put writing above my mental health, I’ll fall apart.
That wasn’t a lesson I learned overnight. And for years I was afraid that any anti-psychotic drugs, even something as common as anti-anxiety medication, would numb my emotions to the point where I was unable to write. That couldn’t be further from the truth and I had the opportunity to write about the experience for Happify.
That essay has the real human experience––the story of my first panic attack and the long journey to get on medication. But as it relates to reading and writing specifically, I have some additional advice.
I know it sounds hokey, but journal, journal, journal! I’ve learned the hard way that your memory is not as good as you think it is. You’ll forget the details of things you fully intend to remember and once those days are gone, you can’t capture that in-the-moment feeling in the same way again. To write about the event or thing later is to write from a place of remove; it is to reconstruct the memory with the details you recall at that moment, not from when the memory is fresh.
Plus, if the situation is traumatic or complicated, journaling through it can help you make sense of things. Journaling is healing. And because the point is healing, don’t seek to publish your journal pages. Write them in a completely unfiltered, non-judgmental way. If you choose to write about the situation for publication later, reference those journal pages, but don’t publish them as you wrote them at the time, even with some editing. Trust me on this. Not only will you probably regret is, they’re likely not as well-thought-out as you imagine they are and you’ll be tempted to self-edit along the way in future journaling, which defeats the purpose.
If journaling isn’t your thing, perhaps text therapy is. That essentially serves the same purpose. I have a therapist with whom I only communicate asynchronously via text and voice message, which I love because I have time to think about what I want to say, I can say it whenever I want even if she’s not “on the clock,” and I can scroll back through and reference what has been shared at any time. For someone who writes memoir, being able to have a safe space to express my emotions in real-time and to be able to reference them later is such a gift. (I’ve been using TalkSpace since 2016. If you’re interested, use my link, pretty please. We both get a discount and it supports this blog.)
If journaling and therapy aren’t your thing, there’s no shame in self-help books. You can do your healing on your own time without necessarily having to process what you’re reading with anyone else. I confess that I used to look down on self-help books, but the ones I’ve read and enjoyed have really served me. Creatively speaking, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and Untamed by Glennon Doyle are solid GOLD. Don’t knock it til you try it.
As much as I want you to go full force toward your writing dreams in the year ahead, I want you to take care of yourselves even more. Not even in the service of writing, but in the service of yourself. I’m realizing that I’ve been apprehensive to set resolutions and goals for 2022 is because since September 2020 when I was thrown into being a full-time writer (a blessing, but one that was stressful for a few months until I got my bearings!) writing is SO much of who I am. It’s the way I pay my bills, it’s how I express myself, and it’s a part of my self-care practice. I’m asking a lot of my words and I want to give myself permission not to push them too hard.
In short, I don’t want to burn out and I don’t want you to either. So if you set a writing goal this year, let at least a part of it be to take care of yourself and just write for yourself and your own healing. Your future self will thank you.
