Joined-up writing
We've always been saving each other, my writing and I
image credit: M. Stanislav
The first story I ever wrote was about a young girl who was playing badminton out in the street and then got lost in a forest, only to be rescued by a helpful cat and a fairy. It was written in block capitals, because I couldn’t do joined-up writing yet.
In the thirty years since, my writing and I have gone through every relationship stage that humans may find themselves in: the honeymoons, the rough patches, the roommates phase, the breakups and the reunions. But it was only in the past few years that I realized that I had viewed that relationship as a one-way street. All too often, to paraphrase a famous saying, I would ask what my writing could do for me, and stop at that.
My only defense is that I had imagined my writing as being a force so much greater than myself. When swept away by the magic that happens when the ever-present need to tell my stories would meet the drive and ability, it wasn’t hard to believe that I was at the mercy of the muses. I would ride this wave until it crashed onto the rocks, then pick myself up and wait for the next one, bide my time until this unfathomable force would reawaken and find me again, and send me on the next stage of my journey.
It took me years to realize that my writing was not an ocean, or a wave, or a wind. It is a formidable force, but it lacks the epic proportions I had ascribed to it. It is only a little more powerful than myself, if that. And every time that my writing no longer drove me, my job was not to sit there waiting for it to reawaken, accepting the ebb and wane as something inevitable, unfathomable and outside of my control.
Every time my writing could no longer propel me forward, it was my job to keep us both moving.
My latest and brightest reunion with my writing happened in March 2020, when a twist of fate and friendship brought back into my life a loved one I thought I had lost. Storytelling was a core part of our relationship, and just as the two of us were going through a personal renaissance even as the world was living through a pandemic, my creativity flourished. I spent close to six months on an uninterrupted high note before a death in the family brought me back to the ground.
As my husband and I flew from the UK to Ukraine to bury the man who was technically my grandfather, but in reality, my dad, I brought my stories with me. Not just in every device I carried, but in every part of me I could access through the numbness of early grief. In the three weeks that followed, I was compelled to manage the feelings of people who had little consideration for my own. I was forced to assist in ugly legal battles with no stakes of my own. All while still reeling from the loss of the only real father I ever had. The man who raised me and who always listened to my stories.
To say that my writing was my lifeline during those three weeks would be doing a disservice to my husband, who stood by me through it all. But sometimes, a storm is strong enough that one lifeline will not suffice. Sometimes you’ve got to hang on to everything and anything you can reach, be it the grounding presence of someone you love and trust implicitly, or an hour spent typing away on a laptop: physically, in a hotel lobby, but in reality, on a fictional planet observing the vagaries of two deeply damaged people in love.
My writing saved me again in 2021. Not at any one dramatic moment, but through a series of cuts steadily ticking up towards a thousand. The slow-burning grief that doesn’t care for schedules. The steadily deteriorating relationship with my emotionally abusive, codependence-seeking mother. A combined reckoning with not new, but newly discovered issues of gender identity and neurodiversity. Coping with the fallout of medical discrimination. A crippling fear of losing my only-recently-returned loved one again.
Once again, it wasn’t just wrtiting that did it. There was therapy, and so much inner work involved. But once again, there are times when you need more than one lifeline. Some days, my stories were escapist. Some days, I would open a vein and pour my deepest, darkest insecurities onto the page. On at least one occasion, I would go back to something I wrote earlier, and find that by writing my character into the same type of problem I was facing myself, I had also already written myself a way out.
In late autumn 2021, the wave I had been riding for some 18 months now crashed onto the rocks and broke me against them. Or so I thought at the time, still operating with inaccurate metaphors.
At that time, I found myself in the aftermath of a short and intense friendship that ended badly. The word “heartbreak” is usually reserved for romantic relationship. I vehemently disagree. You don’t need to be romantically attracted to someone to have your heart broken. All it takes is caring about them, and a measure of trust. I certainty had that, and I had my heart shattered into pieces.
What made things worse is that my heartbreak friend was a fellow writer, and over the few months we were together, writing became quickly and inextricably intertwined with our friendship. After being a thing of joy, escape and catharsis, writing became synonymous with the loss of that person, with heartbreak, with pain. It felt like losing a lifelong friend in the dissolution of a short-lived marriage.
It was then that I realized that it was up to me to save my writing. I wasn’t content to sit and wait until it hurt no longer. I was afraid that leaving it alone for too long would be the equivalent of letting a bone heal wrong; that later, I would have to break things again to make them work.
So I made myself write. It helped that I had promised to deliver a story for a Secret Santa in a group of writers. It did not help that heartbreak friend was a part of said group and the contest organizer. It did help that instead of my big and important long project, I was working on something shorter, seasonal and fluffy.
I wrote. Little by little, I eked out the words without feeling any of the magic. It felt flat. It felt dull.
The first time I felt a flutter of joy in my chest while writing that story, I cried. Not because the scene was especially emotional. The long-awaited, comedically-derailed meeting of two men in love was pure seasonal romantic comedy material, but not emotional enough to warrant tears. But I cried, because it was only then that I realized how afraid I had been that my writing would never bring me joy again. That a part of me believed that I would never find my way back.
I finished the story, and I felt more things as I did. I took that as proof that things may have been damaged, yes, but not lost. The broken bone was set correctly now. It was okay to let it rest and heal.
I took the holidays off. In late January, I made a plan on how to manage my creative practice in 2022, with a focus on sustained and sustainable output.
Exactly four weeks later, Russia began an invasion of my home country.
I watched in mute horror from across the continent, equally safe and helpless. Waiting. For a call from my mother to become her last. For tanks to roll down the highway that runs past my childhood home. For Kyiv to fall.
Every day, I would wake up and check the news, and I would say to my husband: looks like the world is still spinning.
As I write this, almost nine months into the war, the world is still spinning. Kyiv still stands. My mother lives. The tanks had been stopped by a highway bridge right next to the subway station we’d always take to go to my grandparents’ house, back when I could only write stories in block capitals.
In March 2022, I found myself unable to do joined-up writing again. Joining up the letters wasn’t the issue this time; it was joining the words. Even if I succeeded at stringing them into sentences, I couldn’t join them to my brain or my heart.
How could I join the words to my brain if I had split it into airtight compartments to make sure I stay afloat even if my hull were breached?
How could I join the words to my heart if I had locked it in one of those compartments, multiple bulkheads keeping the pain and fear and grief sealed away until such time when I could afford to let them rip through me?
And even if I could find the words and make them make sense, what was the point? What difference would a story of love make in the time of fear and hate?
To me, it turned out, it made all the difference in the world.
In early March 2022, a day after Russia’s war machine had officially turned on civilians, I found myself trying to organize disjointed thoughts into a blog post, in an attempt to justify to myself that creating entertaining content in dark times is not a dereliction of duty. I wish there was a snappy line I could quote from it here, but my words weren’t very eloquent at the time. An occupational hazard of writing while compartmentalized.
Compartmentalized I still had to remain. But I was also going to write again. Because no matter what happened to the world, stories mattered. Or so I had to believe to keep going, anyway.
For a month, I coaxed and pulled and clawed words out of myself, at a pace that made writing post-heartbreak a few months earlier look like NaNoWriMo.
I don’t have a wordcount for that month, but I know that my total time spent writing during March 2022 was under seven hours. Prior to the crash of late 2021, I would frequently average twice that per week.
After a month of this, I started a daily tweet habit to keep myself accountable. I was under no obligation to write every day: only to consider writing as an option. Every day, I would tweet the hashtag #istheowlbearwritingtoday followed by a brief summary of where I stand vis-a-vis writing on the day.
I kept that project up for two months and called time on it when I could no longer honor the “no obligation” clause. There is a fine line between an accountability tool and a stick to beat oneself with, and I felt that I could no longer toe that boundary. The project wasn’t a failure, however; far from it. Even more importantly than the valuable perspective on how I treat myself and my creative practice, it kept writing close to the forefront of my brain. Every day, I would think of writing. And every day, I would remember what it means to me: or rather, what it meant to me when the words could flow freely, before I had to lock so much of myself away.
On June 7, 2022, my daily tweeting about writing stopped. My writing… didn’t.
Now, as the year draws to a close, my writing practice is still far from what I would like it to be. But it’s a labor of love again. It’s a part of me. It’s not something to fear, but something to conquer fear with.
When starting this essay, I believed that for most of this year, I was saving my writing again. Now that I look back, though, I think it was much more of a joint effort.
Just as I refused to let my writing become another thing to be taken away from me, my writing refused to become one of the things I locked myself away from.
We’ve always been saving each other, my writing and I. But we used to do it in turns. This time, it seems, we got our act together at the same time. And even though parts of my brain and my heart are still locked away in the service of structural safety, enough bulkheads have been unsealed to let my words be joined-up again.