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(Full episode transcript below show notes)
There are a lot of ways in which we human beings can be not-okay. Whether it’s illness, injury, grief, caregiving responsibilities, depression, anxiety, family strife, feeling overwhelmed by world events, or any number of other things, our circumstances can have a very serious impact on our creative lives.
There are a lot of people out there saying things like, “Mind over matter,” and “Happiness is a choice,” etc., but I don’t think that’s helpful — especially when we’re not in a position to easily ignore or force a smile through these very real issues.
In this week’s episode, I’m looking at how we can understand and respond to what we’re going through when we’re in the thick of it — whatever “it” may be for you.
I’d also like to encourage you to be kind, gentle, and gracious to yourself — and if that’s difficult for you, think about how you would treat someone you love who is going through the same thing you are — and then do that for yourself.
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Full Episode Transcript:
Sarah Rhea Werner (00:00):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 167: Writing When You’re Not Okay.
(00:28):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and I am recording this for you from my floor.
(00:45):
Now, this may not seem unusual to you — the floor is a perfectly acceptable place to sit. However, I have recorded now over 150 episodes of this podcast (more if you count my “Coffee Break” interviews), and this is the first one I have done not sitting in my office chair at my desk with my recording equipment set up. I instead have my recording equipment here on the floor, and I’m kind of sitting here hunched over my microphone, the curved piece of audio foam that I use as a little booth sort of in a circle around my laptop, which is leaning up against it, and then beneath it are a whole bunch of towels so that you don’t hear the flat surface of the floor, so there’s no reverb or echo or anything. I’ve got everything else I need — I’ve got my tea, I’ve got my Chapstick, normal podcasting stuff. I’m wearing my headphones. But it is all on the floor.
(01:37):
I am sitting on the floor right now because it is literally the only place that I can sit and not be in pain. Long story short, I really messed up the muscles and tendons in my right hip, and they are sort of in a bundled up place with the sciatic nerve, which… I don’t know enough medical stuff to explain to you, but if you do anything to your sciatic nerve, you end up in a lot of pain. Many of you listening to this actually probably know exactly what I’m talking about. But I’ve had this injury now for several months, and it is steadily getting worse. So I am going to a physical therapist now, and I do that for the next six weeks. And in the meantime, I have all sorts of fun physical therapy exercises to do at home. Now, not being a very athletic person, this is not something I have ever really dealt with before, and I felt a little bit like an imposter when I walked into the Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Clinic. I don’t belong in the sports, let’s just say.
(02:43):
I’ve had my share of medical things before — most of the people listening to this right now probably have — but it’s been a long time since I’ve experienced anything this specifically debilitating. Way back in 2015, I recorded a Write Now podcast episode called “Walk It Off” (it’s episode number 006 if you want to go back and listen to it). But I talked about how if we ever turned our ankle or anything, growing up, my dad would have us walk it off. And at the time I talked about how this is also a great metaphor for what you can do if you are stuck writing — go for a walk, move your body. It’s good for you. But I’m at a place right now where I literally cannot go for a walk. I have not been outside except to go to physical therapy in weeks because even sitting in a car is painful.
(03:32):
And it’s definitely changed my relationship with my writing and creativity, which is what I want to talk about today. What now feels like ages ago, I spent my 16th birthday in the hospital. I had extremely severe scoliosis and I needed surgery to correct it so that my spine wouldn’t grow into my heart and my lungs. I was going to be in the hospital for a long time. And so while I was packing before the operation, my — I don’t want to call it “naive” — my optimistic, almost 16-year-old self packed a huge tote bag full of… at the time, I was writing a novel in one of those three-subject, spiral-bound notebooks. So I brought that. I brought a pile of books, both comfort books and books I hadn’t read before. I brought a sketch pad and colored pencils because I figured I’m going to be sitting in a hospital bed all day and what a great time to write.
(04:29):
So I went in for this very complicated spinal surgery where they were grafting bone from my hips into my spine to make sort of one giant big solid bone. And when I came out, I woke up and I was dizzy and sick and confused and sort of out of it in a hospital bed. My mom had very lovingly unpacked my things and had set up a little… I want to say there were little flowers and cards and stuff from my friends and family and all of that. And amidst it all was a stack of the books that I had brought, and my notebook for writing. And the way I felt at that time, with IVs and needles and drains and bandages and sutures and all of that…. I remember looking at that stack of books on the little movable tray next to my hospital bed and just hating them.
(05:22):
And I know that’s a really strong word. It was a really complicated feeling. And also there was a lot of morphine in my system. But I remember looking over at that stack of books and I remember the books. I had A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L’Engle. I had Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede. I had The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Laing. I even had an audiobook version of The Hobbit on something like 12 or 16 cassette tapes. And the whole time I was in the hospital — multiple days as I and learned how to walk again — not once did I feel the desire to open up one of those books, to pop in one cassette of the Hobbit, or most of all to take out my notebook and write.
(06:11):
I remember that feeling of lying there, feeling weak and helpless and exhausted. I’d never been so exhausted in my entire life. Even the thought of reaching over for my notebook was exhausting. I still think about that today, because there’s such a difference between how I feel now, where if I’m lying in bed, I want a book to read or a cassette tape of the Hobbit to listen to or a movie to watch or something to do to keep from getting bored. But it was such a radically different experience in the hospital.
(06:46):
Now I’m talking about this not to gross you out or say, “Oh, woe is me,” or anything like that. I’m saying this because we change as the conditions in which we live change. Something that’s important to us, like writing or creating or reading, might not even be a blip on our radar in certain situations. And in this life, there are a lot of situations like that — where your priorities shift, where you are just trying to survive.
(07:19):
This can look like a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Maybe you are in the hospital yourself. Maybe you just came home from the hospital with a newborn baby. Maybe you’re not living in your usual home right now. Maybe you’re staying with friends or your parents or relatives, or you’re living out of a hotel or a community center or your car. Maybe you are at your house, but you’re on bedrest. Maybe you’re taking care of someone who is on bedrest — a child, a parent, a relative, a friend.
(07:50):
And maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with where you physically are at all. There are so many ways for us to not be okay, for us to be in a space where the things that we usually love to do are the furthest thing from our minds. Maybe you’ve had a loved one pass away and you are dealing with grief. Maybe you’re dealing with a mountain of debt and it’s all you can think about. Maybe you’re sick yourself with something temporary — or less temporary. Maybe you struggle with chronic illness or chronic pain. Maybe you deal — as so many of us do — with depression or anxiety. And maybe, somewhere deep down in your heart, you want to read, you want to write; you want to do the things that you used to love doing, but feel so unthinkable now.
(08:36):
Or maybe you’re looking at the world right now and it just seems like a place that is filled with so much cruelty and malice and anger and greed and so many types of human suffering. You feel like the world is falling apart around you, and everywhere you look, there are just other people making it worse.
(08:58):
Maybe you’re experiencing several of these things at once. I was laying in bed yesterday — or I suppose, grammatically, I was lying in bed yesterday — and I made the mistake of going onto social media. At first, it was just to check my mentions on Facebook and Twitter and a few other things. But inevitably, because this is how the apps are built, I got sucked into scrolling, and I started reading headlines. And I remember after a while, I shook myself out of it and realized what I was doing, because it’s so easy to sort of thoughtlessly slip into reading headline after headline — or, as it is called, “doomscrolling”.
(09:37):
And I was laying there in bed because I can’t walk or sit down, and I was tired of sitting and lying on the hardwood floor. And I remember thinking, “This is what it’s come to. I’m lying here in bed. I can’t walk. I can’t sit at my desk, I can’t sit in the car. I can’t go for a walk outside. I can’t even stand and do dishes,” which…… you think would make me really happy because I hate dishes. But all I could think about was, “My hip is getting worse. And from here, from my phone, from social media, it looks like the world is getting worse. And I’m lying here in bed and I can’t do anything about any of it.”
(10:16):
And it was such a moment of resonance because I looked over at my nightstand and there I have a giant stack of books. It’s my to-be-read pile — my TBR pile, if you will. And there are so many exciting-looking books in that pile that I cannot wait to read — it’s the reason they’re in that pile. And I remember looking at that stack of books and feeling the same thing I felt when I was 16 years old in the hospital. That pile of books looked like a chore. That pile of books looked exhausting.
(10:47):
Now, I think it’s safe to say that physical injuries can wear on you mentally. You can get into kind of a dark place thinking about, “Oh, am I ever going to be able to walk again without pain” Let alone, “How am I going to process this story in my brain?” Let alone thinking about your creative projects? The idea of opening up a notebook or my laptop and doing some creative writing was so far from my mind as I was lying in that bed.
(11:18):
Now, I did feel that twinge of guilt — the “I should be writing” sort of pull, the “Oh my gosh, I am just lying here when I should be putting in words on this thing I’m working on.” But aside from the anxiety caused by expectation, aside from that pressure, I did not have a desire to write.
(11:42):
I know that as we get older, we hopefully get wiser. And I remember talking with a writer friend a few years ago who was going through a massive amount of grief after the passing of a loved one. And I remember asking her, “Well, have you done any writing? Have you tried writing about it or journaling or tried any poetry about how you feel?” And she just said, “No.” At the time, I had good intentions, and I really was trying to be helpful. But now that I look back on that, if somebody would’ve walked into my room yesterday when I was lying in bed in pain and despair, and they would’ve said, “Hey, Sarah, why don’t you try journaling through how you feel right now?” I might have thrown one of my TBR books at them.
(12:30):
I recorded an episode at the end of 2015 called “Creating in a Time of Destruction”. It’s episode 031 of the Write Now Podcast. And at the time when I recorded that episode, I was still learning — well, and I mean I’m still learning today, and hopefully I will still be learning 10 years from now. But in that episode, I quoted Maxine Hong Kingston, who very famously said, In a time of destruction, create something.”
(12:59):
And it is a truly beautiful and powerful statement. And the idea is that, when times are hard, when we feel powerless, when it seems like the world is crumbling around us, we need to remember that we have power, we have creative power, and we can use that power to respond to destruction, to bad things happening, in a way that is positive and constructive.
(13:24):
And I still believe that is absolutely true today. We are powerful, creative beings and the words that we write, the things that we create, have power. Like so many other things, they have the power to create and destroy, to harm or to help, to wound or to heal. Words have the power to expose truth and shape the future. They can help us process and heal things that are happening to us or have happened to us.
(13:52):
But I think it’s also good to acknowledge, with no small degree of empathy, that if you are in a very bad place right now, if you are not okay, I’m not going to tell you, “Well, you should be writing.” If you’re in the hospital or on bed rest, I’m not going to march in and throw a notebook at you and tell you to start writing because “it’s good for you.” And it is. But I also now understand and empathize that we’re really complex, and sometimes we just have to sit with something until we’re ready to take action, until we’re ready to dive into our creative power.
(14:34):
And if you’re not ready right now, if you are in the midst of it — illness, depression, anxiety, some kind of life emergency — it’s okay to take a deep breath — it’s okay to take several deep breaths! — and process where you are. Now, if you do feel like writing, if you know that writing will make you feel better, if you’re in a situation where journaling out some of this stuff will help you process it, then I definitely encourage you to do that. But I know that when you’re in the thick of things, it can be really hard to know, “Should I be writing right now? Should I try? Should I push myself? What if I slide back into grief and I never do anything ever again?” I want you to know you’re not alone. And if you’re feeling some urge to write, whether it is guilt-induced or delight-at-your-project induced, I encourage you to think, before you do anything, given how you’re feeling and what you’re going through, what will writing give to you… or what will writing take away?
(15:42):
This can be time-wise, energy-wise, emotion-wise, and it can vary project by project. You may have absolutely no tolerance for the rom-com you were writing last month, but maybe a little bit of journaling about what you’re going through right now could help you process what you’re going through right now. Or maybe you just need some escapism and you need to set aside your journal and write some fanfiction.
(16:10):
This can be project-by-project, because another thing I’ve learned is that not all writing is the same. Some writing takes energy, and some writing replenishes your energy, and it can do different things in different seasons. It helps, in my mind, to compare it with reading.
(16:28):
So there’s a big difference in reading a new graphic novel that you just got for your birthday versus reading a textbook for a class that you are falling behind on. Those are both reading, technically, but they are wildly different situations. And reading in one is exhausting and reading in the other one is energy- and life-giving.
(16:50):
I’ve been thinking about this because with my own situation, I’ve had to put my main project on hold for a couple of days, and I had not realized how much of my self-worth and self-esteem came from making progress on that project. And I didn’t know how different it would be to try and work on it when I was in a different physical and mental state. And some uncharitable little nugget-part of my brain was saying, “What, are you just going to stop writing on the days when you don’t feel like it?!” That little nugget in my brain is really mean. It’s really aggressive.
(17:30):
I thought about it the other night, too, when I was doing my Create-Along livestream. So — I’ve been doing Create-Along livestreams on Wednesdays and Fridays, and you can visit my website for more information on that (that’s Sarah Werner dot com — S-A-R-A-H-W-E-N-E-R dot com). But I had to do my Create-Along livestream from the floor, where I am now. And about halfway through Friday’s livestream, I was like, I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can sit here any longer. I was in pain, I was feeling dizzy, and then I thought, “Well, I made a commitment to be here, and these people are counting on me.” And I think there were only eight or nine people there, but I felt like I needed to have integrity and follow through on what I had said.
(18:16):
And I thought about, “Well, there’s this streamer that I like to watch who even streams when they’re sick, and you can hear it in their voice, and maybe I should try to be like them, who streams no matter what.” And so in the moment, I just decided, “I’m going to stick this out. I’m going to sit here and do my writing and then talk to people about how it went and see how they’re feeling, and we’ll have a discussion, and then I’m going to just immediately go fall down and go to bed.”
(18:42):
But on the other side of that, I wonder: was that maybe not a good idea? Should I maybe have said, “Hey, I’m injured. I’m in a lot of pain and I need to go lay down. Thank you for understanding.”? Because I’m sure that folks would’ve understood — just like for the streamer that I like watching, if they said, “You know what, guys? I am just not feeling great.” I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, go lay down. That’s fine. Go rest.”
(19:07):
Did I do myself a disservice by pushing through it? Am I doing myself a disservice by not pushing through it with this writing project? And… I don’t know. That’s the frustrating — not even just frustrating — that’s the irritating, angering part of it all. In the moment, I don’t know what to do. Should I write? Should I not write? Should I push through? Should I take a day off? If I take a day off, should I take two days off? What is permissible? What is healthy?
(19:39):
And for those of us who grew up doing our best pushing and trying to be our best, being one of those kids who got an award at the end of the school year for no absences (a.k.a. being the kid who came to school sick and then got everybody else sick) — is there merit in that? Does it carry any moral weight, any righteousness?
(20:02):
And I suppose that could depend on who you asked. If I leave halfway through a livestream of eight people, am I ruining their evening? I mean, probably not. My ego’s not that big. But it still felt out of integrity with what I had said I was going to do.
(20:18):
When Tim got home — he’s been volunteering at a youth center here in town — when Tim got home, he was like, “You did that stream. You should have gone to bed! You need to be taking care of yourself, Sarah. You need to be healing. The people in your livestream would’ve understood if you had left.”
(20:33):
But I feel like that, too, has varying degrees. Sure, if I was charging people $200 to be there and then I just walked out, that would be not okay, and I’d have to reconcile, give them their money back, et cetera. But on a day-to-day basis, how much we can we afford to let how we feel affect what we create?
(20:57):
And I know a lot of this comes from hustle culture. I know a lot of this comes from a toxic place of taking and taking and taking from someone else’s labor until they’re completely burned out. I worked in marketing for years, which is a very high-turnover profession, because if you work for a marketing agency, they tend to push you super-hard and get all of your creative ideas out and all of your projects out and your time and your energy. And then when you burn out, you go to another agency, and you think it’ll be different.
(21:27):
So I encourage you: when you’re in the thick of it, give yourself some grace. You are going through a Thing, and that Thing has weight. It has consequences. It has an effect on you, on your mental and physical health.
(21:42):
As to whether or not you should create or write through it… I don’t have an answer for you. All I can suggest is some gentle trial and error. Sit up (or sit down), grab a pen, grab your phone, grab a laptop, and put down a few words, and see how that feels. If you fall asleep halfway through, you need to rest.
(22:07):
And I think deep down inside, you’ll know if it’s the right time to start writing or not. Because there’s a difference, a very subtle difference that I’m still figuring out for myself, between when it’s a good idea to push through what you’re feeling and when it’s a good idea to rest.
(22:25):
I hope this was helpful for you, at least in some way, even if just to make you feel a little bit less alone. Or to help you think through what you might do in a situation like this if it were to arise. Because while we are incredibly, powerfully human, we are also… human, prone to illness and fear and grief. And maybe there isn’t any sort of moral imperative as to whether or not we should write in a given situation. Maybe there is no right or wrong answer. Maybe there’s just us, and what we need, and what we need to figure out in order to survive and heal and thrive.
(23:09):
I would not be able to create this podcast without the generous support of donors on Patreon, Ko-fi, PayPal, and all of those other platforms that allow listeners to help support the show financially. While I make the show available for free to as many people as possible, it’s not free for me to make. And so those donations are greatly appreciated. Special thanks for this week’s episode go out to patrons: Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferrara, Kim, Mike Tefft, Poppy Brown, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney McGruder. Thank you all so, so much for your financial support. It makes a huge difference.
(23:54):
If you — yes, you! — would like to help support this show financially, then I would be extremely grateful. You can do so by clicking the link in the show notes for today’s episode. Alternately, you can go out to Sarah Werner dot com — that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R dot com, and going to the show notes for today’s episode (this is episode 167) and clicking the button that says, “Support This Podcast”.
(24:20):
I mentioned in the last episode that Patreon has made some changes to their platform, and donations are now monthly instead of per episode. The Patreon app on iOS — so, the Patreon app on Apple phones and other devices, I guess — has shifted so that Apple now takes 30% of your donations if you donate through the iOS Patreon app. So if you’re on an Android, you’re fine; if you’re on a Mac and you’re using your web browser to access Patreon, that’s fine. You don’t get penalized or anything. But it’s just that iOS app that’s just, I don’t know, hurting a lot of independent creators.
(25:02):
If you would like to donate in other ways, there are other ways available in the show notes. I have a link to Ko-fi-slash-“coffee” and to PayPal. So if that makes sense for you to do right now, if you feel moved to do that, I would greatly welcome and appreciate it.
(25:16):
If you are in a spot where finances are a little bit tight, I one million percent understand, and you can actually help support the show just by telling someone else about it — another writer, a student, someone you know who has a talent for writing and maybe hasn’t explored it fully yet. Let them know about the Write Now podcast. If they don’t know how to download a podcast, show them… using the Write Now podcast. Seriously, though, I do appreciate you listening. I do appreciate you sharing the show and leaving comments and thoughts, and I’m just so grateful that you’re here.
(25:52):
And with that, this has been episode 167 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go rest.