one thing

imagine you can do only one thing well and then suddenly you can't do it anymore

photo by me

Sometimes I forget how to write and I give it up for a while. But I always come back to it. This is about that.

Imagine you can only do one thing well. Then imagine taking that thing you do well and discarding it, just tossing it aside like it didn’t matter. Imagine it was something you did every day. Imagine not doing it, ever again.

You are left with an emptiness, a blankness that speaks of space and darkness. You are left with questions about your self worth, with one less way to justify your existence. You are left with a black hole that gets bigger every day until it threatens to overtake your entire being.

You have effectively written yourself off the planet.

Just one thing. You can’t sing or play an instrument. You can’t draw for shit. You can’t even fold clothes in a way where they don’t wrinkle. But you can write. You can write the hell out of things. You can take words and turn them into frilly sentences, and turn those sentences into paragraphs and those paragraphs into prose. You don’t come to that conclusion yourself; hundreds of people have told you that you can write, that you can convey, that you can create. And you believed them.

Until you didn’t.

There came a time when it all piled up. The essays, the short stories, the novel, the thinkpieces, all jumbled up together forming a hill you climb up and contemplate jumping off of. That hill represents years of unpublished work. Even the stuff that was published, you look back on it and wonder what the hell people were talking about because it doesn’t seem good to you, your talent isn’t apparent, your creativity seems stilted. You are standing on an imposter’s hill, made up of everything you once thought was worthy but in retrospect is lacking.

You jump.

You land on your back, wince a bit, roll around, then get up and run as far from the hill as possible. You are in an open field. There is nothing here to write with. No computer, no typewriter, no pen and paper. And you feel free. You no longer will struggle with imposter syndrome. You will no longer spend each morning banging out words that very few people will read. You will no longer dig into your thoughts, revisit the past, contemplate the future, writhe about in the present. You are free from the clack-clack-clack of the 4am keyboard, from trying to reach deep into yourself to pull out the words that people think come so easy.

You are free.

And so you spend the next few months doing other things. You fill your writing time with reading books you wish you wrote and binge watching tv shows you wish you created. You listen to music and the lyrics remind you of stringing words together to mean something. You miss writing, but even more, you miss feeling like you are good at something. Without the writing, without the clack-clack-clack, you are nothing. You are not defined by anything. You were a writer. Now, you are not. And there is nothing — no talent, no endeavor, no hobby — to fill the space. You have taken the only thing you were proud of, the only thing people identified you by, and stricken it from your life. Now there is an emptiness, a blank space that devours your soul, because suddenly, you are nothing. You are a husk. You have no worth.

You fight with yourself. You argue. You say that it’s not worth it to go back, that no one read what you wrote, that it wasn’t even that good, that the mental anguish of trying to establish yourself wasn’t worth the output. But there’s the outlet, the exercise of writing every day, the thing that purged the jumbled thoughts in your head. The thing that, yes, brought you joy. Even when it wasn’t that great, even when people told you it was great but you didn’t believe them, you still found joy in the very act of putting the words down. When a sentence came together, when the thoughts coalesced into something lyrical, it was grand. It was a joy. It gave you meaning. It gave you life. It gave you worth. So you start again.

clack-clack-clack.

It’s 4am and you realize that you forgot how to write. In those few months after you jumped off your hill and ran away from your creations, from yourself, you forgot how to start. You forgot how to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into stories. You stare at a blank space like it’s going to suddenly start talking to you and tell you what to do. But nothing happens. Because you forgot. It didn’t take long, it never does. You remember how you used to make chicken francese once a week for your ex-husband and you haven’t made it in so long that you forgot and had to look up the recipe when you got over the memories and wanted to make it again. But there’s no how-to on making the words appear on the screen. There’s no recipe to help you remember the only thing you were ever good at when it leaves you.

You feel blank, you feel like you are the empty page. There’s a great void in your life now and you know why that void is there but maybe it’s become too large to fill. You have separated yourself, the writer from the non-writer, and the writer is hovering over you, breathing down your neck, cajoling you to write, to form a whole person again.

So you write.

You write about forgetting how to write. You wonder if anyone will read it. You don’t care. For the first time since you were about fourteen, you are writing for you, for your own need, because you have to. You are writing for an audience of one, for the sole reason of finding your self worth again. Because this is it. This is the only thing you do well.

So do it.