How To Be A Writer When You Feel You Can’t

What do we do when we can’t write? We write of course.

Today I can’t write (she writes). I am carrying a deep sadness within myself that seems to come from another time and space; it has little relevance to my life in this moment and yet it is present. Writing about emotional pain, distress and recovery is my thing’, it’s what I write about. It’s also what I help others to write about, to articulate and to express.

Through my own journey and those I have worked with, I have learnt that not all pain and emotional distress can be expressed and articulated. This can be frustrating to the person who is the ‘helper’ and annoying for the person being ‘helped’ who is often seeking to be ‘fixed’.

But some pain is too deep and has become a part of our fabric that we learn to live with. The best place to go with this is to a place of understanding and acceptance and the healing outcome is in the fact that these deep unexplainable sorrows do not prevent us from living our lives. We can live with them. They do not dictate who we are. They do not define us. But they are with us.

I hear so much of the rhetoric around dealing with our ‘stuff’ is an ideology of somehow annihilating our history when actually embracing our human complexity, and all of the years of experiences that make up our personal jigsaw, is to love all of ourselves, in the good moments and the difficult moments.

We are not to be rushed off and ‘fixed’, ‘transformed’ and ‘reborn.’ But in the moment, right now whatever it is that we’re feeling, we love all of that, regardless, no matter what. For me, it is in the not ‘fixing’ that we can find some peace with our pains.

There, I have written. How to be a writer….

And I feel so much better for expressing and articulating my sadness and accepting it lovingly….

I hope that this rambling has brought you something worth thinking about today.