How to Stop Writing

A recent tapestry. Thankfully the ideas on the loom are still coming.

When I first started this newsletter, my intention was that I let my own interest guide what I wrote. I was here for this purpose: to show up on a regular basis, publish my writing to a small number of people, and release the need for perfection or outside confirmation that the writing is “good.” It was about the routine, the habit, the practice.

Early on, I wondered if writing and sharing weekly essays would use up all of my ideas. Some essay concepts have lived with me for a while, and I hoard them as mystical, publishable future essays that I am waiting to be “ready” to write. But as I wrote and shared freely here, and watched other writers on do the same, I realized that there would always be enough stories, enough ideas. Existing in my day to day life with an eye open toward stories to tell, connections to make, meant I could always come up with something to write about.

But this fall I started second guessing and judging my ideas. I wrote an essay about how traveling to Germany brought up old memories of finding my confidence as a college student on a study abroad trip in Europe. I edited it while sitting in the hotel bar in Hanover, Germany while observing hoards of people who were in town for a conference gather together for dinner and drinks. When it came time to read it over for the last time before publishing it, I was embarrassed at how cliche it sounded. It’s still sitting in my drafts, smarting like a fresh paper cut.

I wrote another essay about turning 36, and both the fear and relief of potentially aging out of being perceived and treated as a “young woman.” I’d read that when women reach a certain age, usually around 40, they begin to feel overlooked, so much so that it has been given a term by psychologists: “Invisible Woman Syndrome.” I wrote about how I find that both terrifying–because I do like being seen–and freeing to think that the less society places expectations on me to act and look a certain way, the more I can discover who I’d be without those expectations.

But after writing it, I Googled “Invisible Woman Syndrome” and read people mocking it on Reddit (“Boohoo, you don’t get to benefit from being pretty anymore!”) and felt embarrassed for even considering it a worthy topic. To the unpublished drafts folder it went.

And so the writing ideas, scared off by my harsh judgement, stopped coming around as often. A favorite book I had the idea to write an essay about even literally went missing in my home and still hasn’t turned up. I swore to try some sort of daily practice–morning pages or 1000 words or–to get the words flowing but didn’t even begin. Even my own essay about beginning again couldn’t get me to begin again.

So it made sense to examine why I stopped in the first place. Judging your ideas might also be why you have given up something recently–a creative project, an intriguing idea. I have no advice on what to do when you realize it’s because you scared the ideas away by being so hard on them. I’m still sitting with that discomfort, turning it over like a stone in my pocket. I am still sitting in resistance and fear and shame, but I’m still going to try to show up in spite of it, and I hope you do too. ¹

1. If you’d like to see some more of my weaving, you can see it at www.northwoven.com/shop. I have some new work available ahead of the holidays!