I’ve been thinking of a way to explain my absence in the last few days and weeks. I’ve been gone from Facebook and Twitter, I’ve made few appearances on the blog, and I’ve even missed a few issues of this newsletter. And I suppose the answer can be nothing but honest and brutal: I burned out and crashed.
This isn’t the pretty burnout most writers will admit to that makes them sound hardworking and passionate about what they do, but the kind that leads to missed deadlines, denial, and ultimately, a crippling depression that, at least in my case, lasted for weeks.
This is the part most writing blogs and newsletters (including mine) don’t talk about. The part where you have to apologize to someone you meant to respond to but didn’t and while you want to tell the truth, the words “I was depressed and hiding under the covers” only serves to make you sound juvenile and flaky, even though you’re anything but in the months and years that you manage to remain sane and productive.
The part in which you’re embarrassed that you missed a deadline by a day or the part in which you turn down profitable assignments from regular clients because all you see when you look at words on a page are black letters swimming on a white screen and that while logically, you know that you were once a writer and perhaps will be again, in that moment, all you are is paralyzed.
Worse, you feel like you have nowhere to turn to for help because surely there’s no one who’s ever been through this before, certainly not the writers who proclaim proudly on their websites that they’ve never missed a deadline or the ones who tell you that writing is a business and that by treating it like a depressed artist, you’re making life harder for all of us.
But the truth is that many of us go through the writing life with periods of extremely high highs and very low lows. And while the highs are up there for everyone to see—the book deals, the movie rights sales, the bestsellers, the completed novels, the media appearances—the discussion about the lows is missing. We’re not talking about what we should do or where we should turn when the lows get too low to be bearable.
And so today, I’m talking about it. Because I reached out to three experienced writers this time around and each of them said, without missing a beat, that they go through the lows as well, sometimes as many as two or three times a year. And they don’t know where to turn either.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do have one solution: Stop hiding under the covers. Acknowledge a problem if you have one and try to get help for it before it interferes with your life, work, and sanity. Take a long walk in the woods. Do some light reading on the beach. Call a friend in the middle of the night and have a long conversation. Bake yourself a chocolate cake (even better, get someone to do it for you). Go for a run. Ignore work, e-mails, Facebook, and Twitter. They’ll survive fine without you and in fact, most people won’t even notice that you’re gone.
Be nice to yourself, especially when you’re hurting but even when you’re not.
The writing career is a long one. It doesn’t matter if it takes you an additional three months to finish that book that you wanted to write this year. Be committed, get your work done, but learn from my mistake: Don’t push yourself so hard that you have no choice but to burn out and crash.
What’s the one thing you can do today for your well-being that might make you a more productive writer tomorrow?
I’m off to read Stephen King’s On Writing. And you?