I woke up this morning thinking about what I call, the Writer’s Depression.
I experience it. And most of my clients and the writers I know do too.
It happens right after you write, particularly something that is real, holds the truth, and actually feels good coming out on the page.
And it looks like this for me:
I write something that finally comes together after some struggle. The struggle magically forms itself into some kind of sentence or paragraph cohesion that feels really amazing.
It’s the feeling that every writer has felt and then longs for. It’s the feeling that actually drives me to the blank page.
The good feeling usually lasts the rest of the day and into the next morning.
I feel tingly.
I feel “complete.”
I feel whole.
I feel possible, like I might just own this writing thing.
I feel the validation and value of my work just by being present to it and by having shown up and allowed the magical moments of its flow and arrival.
And I feel the door of possibility open to the thought of publishing what I wrote and having the validation of others as well.
Then something happens.
Some kind of insidious thought creeps in and starts to strangle that sense of ease and inspiration.
It’s not obvious at first. It fact it’s just a slightly off feeling, one that sometimes leads me toward the pantry where I grab a small handful of spicy hot Cheetos or Sour Cream & Onion Lays.
They are a small reward for work well done. I don’t eat many, just a few to satisfy my desire for salty, crunchy, things.
The feeling feels a bit like excitement and even a determination to return to the page and do it again. Then the feeling starts to get stronger.
It turns into a full sense of agitation.
This agitation starts forming thoughts about the future, what needs to be done, what isn’t yet done, how the writing felt good, but was it really?
Did it really have that talent that I so want it to have? Was everyone in my writing group or my writing coach or my friend with whom I shared it, just placating me and telling it was good?
I start telling myself, all those things “don’t count.” They would only count if my favorite, most admired writer, or one of the big New York Publishing houses, told me it was good.
So I read it again. Now it doesn’t have the same pizzazz it did when I read it at least 3-4 times after finishing it when it felt good. When it felt like “yes” that’s it.
Now it feels flat, incoherent, and pedestrian.
The worst thing I can do when I get to this place is to start to editing and rewriting it.
Serving my writing well becomes impossible because now, rather than letting it be the truthful, authentic, the most “my voice” thing there is, I start comparing it to a model in my mind that is an unreal combination of the best writing I’ve ever read in my life.
It’s like when you compare yourself to a magazine model and perpetually feel bad that you aren’t like her when the truth is, she isn’t even like her. She is an amalgamation of the best parts of all women photoshopped into a something that is just not real and never will be.
So I go on to photoshop my masterpiece into something two-dimensional and unrecognizable.
I kill the alive, breathing, blemished, but truly real and human thing I naturally created.
Either that or I don’t write at all. I hit a dry, blocked, frozen spell.
My mind starts directing my body to do anything but sit down in the chair and write. Anything but that.
I also start to avoid reading anything by anyone else that might be good because it will trigger an avalanche of comparison and inadequacy, so I start to avoid books, email and social media, and I usually find my way to some kind of TV binge watching episode.
This just increases the suffering.
Now I feel cut off, isolated, and as if I’ve never done or written anything good in my entire life. All of it. Absolutely all of it is a sham.
Sound familiar? Do you have your own version of this?
I call it the Writer’s Depression.
And I don’t know a writer who doesn’t experience it in some way.
Writing is intimate, especially good, powerful, moving, truthful writing. It requires exposure.
All of our lives we are taught to mitigate exposure, to wear clothes to protect us from the weather, to wear a hat or sunscreen to protect us from the sun. To not over share at the office holiday party so we don’t risk losing our jobs.
Writing something real and sharing it is like going to the beach for the day with no clothes on, no sun screen, and when you get there, remembering it is also the location of your work party and everyone you know is there.
This really is what it feels like to be a writer. It’s excruciating just as much as it is exhilarating.
I just told my husband yesterday in a fit of tears that anyone in their right mind would never choose this, never choose to be a writer. Why would anyone want to torture themselves like that?
But the truth is, writing chooses you and there is nothing you can do about it.
(Except, of course, ignore it and not write, but in my experience that leads to even bigger problems and deeper depressions).
The thing is, the more you feel good about your writing, the deeper you will despair about it when you hit the inevitable plunge of depression that happens afterward.
This is because the writing process is like breathing.
Writing requires expansion and contraction to keep things alive and moving. It’s all one movement. It’s one gesture that happens whether you are thinking about it or not.
This is what you must learn to be with as a writer.
You must remember that when you experience the contraction that inevitably comes from a moment of expansion in your writing, NOTHING IS WRONG.
In fact everything is right because it means you are writing.
It means you are braving the path of the writer.
You are opening up and expanding into new meaning AND you are contracting into the integration of that new meaning. And then you do it all over again and again and again.
Just as your lungs expand and then contract to keep your blood pumping, your organs oxygenated, and your body functioning and alive, so too does writing expand and contract you to nourish your creative human spirit and to keep it alive and breathing in the miraculous place between heaven and earth.
The biggest mistake you can make is to make this natural, inevitable cycle a PROBLEM!
This is not to minimize or dismiss the realities of severe, clinical depression. This too is real and happens for a large majority of the population. If you experience depression that does not pass or deepens with time, then it is important you seek professional/medical help.
What I am speaking to is also a real experience for writers. One that can be debilitating in it’s own way and isn’t often revealed, talked about, or seen when you read a beautiful piece of writing that, to you, seems like it flowed from the writer with ease. It likely did, but it also likely had a moment of contraction that came with it. One that you will never see. One that stopped the writer in her tracks so she could integrate and then move into the next, new moment of meaning.
So if this cycle is familiar to you, I invite you to take a step closer to it.
What happens when you accept, expect, and even welcome the Writer’s Depression?
Doing this has allowed me to see it for what it is.
The Writer’s Depression is a moment of integration.
It is a time when I shed the old way of being and the old meaning that no longer serves me.
It is another layer of my inner critic growing old, and dying. It is a moment when she grasps and tries to protect me because she knows, and feels that I am breathing the whole truth in more deeply.
When you feel the Writer’s Depression, it is your reminder that nothing you write ever comes out how you imagine it and it’s not supposed to.
It is your reminder that you are simply here to write because writing has chosen you.
It chose you because it loves you and it doesn’t care what you think about it.
It simply wants you to allow the miraculous.