On Giving Up

The last time I published a blog post, I shared a lot of the internal conflict that I was facing in my writing. How I had been pushing myself so hard for years. How I felt like I had corrupted the joy that I had once had while writing. How I was so often tempted to give it all up.

I concluded with a hopeful message and the assurance that I would press on and keep writing. But guess what? I haven’t. In fact, that was kind of a turning point for me in that, following that post, I basically stopped trying to write.

Which is not to say that I haven’t written at all. I have a little bit. A tiny bit on my novel. I wrote a whole other blog post that I haven’t published as of yet. I’ve journaled a little bit, written to a friend, and tweaked some lyrics to a song that I’ve had in the works for years. But it’s been very sporadic and hasn’t added up to a whole lot.

I’m in a very interesting time in my life right now. I’m twenty. I’ve been out of school for a year. I’m only working part time.

I look around and wonder what I’m doing. What am I doing with all this time? What am I creating? What am I making of myself? The funny thing is, I can live with those questions, and I didn’t use to be able to. I can look at my laptop that I haven’t turned on in two weeks and say to myself, “Yep. I don’t need that. It can sit there for two more.” I can look at my Bible (this example sounds a lot worse, I’ll be honest) that I haven’t opened in three days and think to myself, “That’s okay. That’s good. I’ll get back into it and be refreshed by it soon, but I don’t have to stress about it.”

At this point, I’m probably not making much sense to you guys, so let me explain what this means. What’s the deal with my laptop? Why does it matter that I haven’t turned it on in two weeks?

My laptop is something that I’ve spent a looot of time on. I attended online school for five years, and turning on that laptop was something I did pretty much every day of the week, especially when I started doing more college. It represented showing up to work. It was a necessity.

My writing was also something that I did on that laptop. I scheduled it in pretty much every day of the week next to my schooling and treated it like a job. Unlike my school obligation, my writing commitment kept going over the summer, especially if I was participating in a writing challenge like the 100-for-100 hosted by Go Teen Writers, in which I would write at least 100 words every day for six days a week all summer. I was super consistent. I was dedicated. I put my schoolwork first, of course, but writing was my number one personal goal, and so it had first dibs on any free time that I had.

The thing is, in order to be this dedicated, I had to prioritize. And believe me, I was pretty darn good at that. I managed my school schedule very carefully, particularly when I was taking college classes, which I did for three years of high school and the year after graduation. And for my writing, I tracked my word count, set all kinds of mini goals, did word sprints with other writers, etc. Online distractions were always present, of course, so I had to keep checking myself and always stay aware of where my time was going.

I actually managed to discover the wonder of friendships during high school and had a few people that I would have fun with. I very intentionally set aside time to spend with them and gave myself permission to not be more “productive” during that time, because otherwise I would feel anxious and guilty about it. Even so, there came a point where I would rein myself back in to get caught up on my personal goals. Having a social life did need to be on the list of priorities, I decided, but not too high.

During my last term of college, I got so mentally overwhelmed that I struggled to put any time into school at all. Spring term was always hardest for me, because I wanted to be out enjoying the sunshine, not sitting still at a desk indoors. I ended up dropping my writing for the time being so that I could dedicate all of my penned-up-at-a-desk time to getting my classes done and hopefully survive to graduation. Which I did, and after I did, I tried to get myself back into writing.

I was exhausted, though. I could barely produce. I was never satisfied with what I wrote. I was reluctant to waste any more of my youth not slaving toward success, but I came to realize that I needed a break. So, I would take a break. A few days. A week. A month. Three months. I would always come back, because it never left the back of my mind, but I was never refreshed enough to keep at it. So, I would allow myself another break. I didn’t want to keep doing that, but it seemed the most prudent way to get to my goal. I would perform best if my mind and emotions were healthy, right? So rest was just another practical step on my journey.

The problem was that I never fully took the pressure off. My intent was always to go back. I was trying to quick-charge myself, and my break was only justifiable if I got the end result that I wanted. I would try to strategize my rest, design a perfect plan to refresh my mind. Certain activities to complete, a certain time constraint, all of that. And it wasn’t restful at all.

I had a kind of funny habit that I battled prior to this, most notably during my senior year of high school. At the time, I was under a heavy load of dual-credit classes, was breaking my mare to ride for my senior project, and had career preparation to do for my senior capstone. On top of that, I knew that I needed to earn some scholarships. Unfortunately, after I would invest a bunch of time and energy into finding scholarships to apply for, I would inevitably get exhausted and overwhelmed and cut back to the bare minimum for a month or longer, often missing the deadlines for the scholarships that I had already invested time into procuring. It was immensely frustrating, especially since I would usually only get a week or maybe two of high performance before the slump would occur, and I usually couldn’t pull myself out of my avoidance phase until it had run its full course.

That particular circumstance was what helped me to recognize this behavior cycle, but I do it in many other areas. I’ll put together a blog post, share it on Facebook and send it out in emails, and then immediately drop off the Internet for weeks, completely ignoring all the people kind enough to read my thoughts and give feedback or try to engage. I tend to pop in and out of touch with my friends. I’ll dive into a new study of the Bible and sometimes by the end of the first session feel almost manic and want to get away. I just exhaust myself so quickly that I’ll yo-yo straight to the opposite extreme and usually stay there longer. And the longer I stay, the more the obligations pile up, and the harder it is to come back.

This is something I’m still working on. It’s helped a lot for me to try to soften my “manic” phase so as to not fall so hard in the opposite direction, and I honestly struggle a lot less now with anxiety and avoidance coping.

But in short, that’s why I’m here ranting to you all today about why I’m not writing. At this moment in time, I’ve pretty much quit. I doubt that I’ll stay in this place forever, but I will defend my right to be here. I’ve needed this.

In the last couple of months, there have been many times when I would look at my laptop and think about my previous “career” that I made of sitting down every day to write. I would think about booting that little machine up and sliding into my little desk to get to typing. And most of the time when I would picture myself doing that and experience it as a hypothetical in my mind, I would hate it. That’s a big part of the reason why I’ve barely written since my last blog post. I don’t want to be on this computer. I don’t want to have to wait while it boots up and loads everything before I can do anything on it. And I kind of don’t want to show up to “work” anymore because I don’t want it to be work. Why am I even doing this? The thrill of writing has faded for me. I’m discovering my story as I go, so there’s no particular message that I’m writing toward, really. Why does this story matter? I don’t know that it does. And I don’t know that I have it in me right now.

I’ve lived the last several months in what has felt kind of like an emptied-out life. I go to work, but I’m part time. And as soon as I leave there, I’m done. No more obligation to think about it. No more mental work to be done. I have a lot of free time, and I’ve squandered a lot of it. Watching YouTube. Messing around. And sometimes that has made me anxious, and I know that it hasn’t been healthy. But I’ve also done a lot of other stuff. Riding horses with my neighbors. Spending more time with family. Learning to crochet. I’ve also not cleaned my house all that consistently, but I catch up on it every once and a while and don’t stress about it too much. My family has had quite a few social events, which has been unusual for us, and I’ve enjoyed them immensely, which is unusual for me.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve been a delinquent, and I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve struggled with letting writing go just because I’ve held on for so long and so tightly. It was the core of my identity. It was the main trajectory of my life. And when I was still striving so hard to make it work, I felt with every fruitless day like my worth was being ripped away from me.

Being a part of the writing community, I know quite a few successful writers. Quite a few are my age and even younger, and I’ll be honest, that’s hard for me. I don’t understand how they could have made it the full journey to publication, kept up with social media and blogging, and still be cranking out books. I don’t understand because I worked so hard and often felt that it was just one step ahead of me, that if I made just one little change or tackled it another way, that all of a sudden the dam would break and flood me in a new season in which everything finally clicked into place. But that’s not what happened. I pushed until I fell apart.

I used to confront my sense of inferiority by promising myself that I would keep going until I earned my place among them. I would believe for the time that I had it in me, and I would hold to that belief until I gave myself proof. But the longer I held out, still trying to prove myself, the more I started to wonder if my greatest fear wasn’t a lie after all. Maybe I’m just inferior. Maybe I’m just too meticulous and am doomed to spend the rest of my life obsessing over stupid things. Maybe I just don’t have the intellect to craft a plot that makes sense. Maybe I’m too abstract and flowery to ever write good prose. Maybe I just don’t have it. Maybe these other writers do.

It’s been so freeing to not have a goal. To not be on a plan. To not care as much whether I’m earning my right to exist. I mentioned earlier that I can look at my Bible, not having opened it for three days, and be okay with that. And that’s hard for me to say, because I know that I need that Bible. I know that it’s rich and God-breathed and capable of sustaining me when nothing else can. I’m just tired of that old surge of anxiety that would come when I realized that I had let the habit slip. I’m tired of being upset that I’ll never get it all together and be a model Christian beyond fault. I’m tired of my love for Jesus being twisted into a source of stress and condemnation.

And I’m tired of idolizing writing and making it into something that maybe it was never meant to be for me.

About a year ago, on one of my longer breaks from writing, I very consciously focused on living. Since I had cut writing out for the time being, I no longer had to cut out everything else to make room for it. I wanted to try new things and experience the real world instead of spending all my energy crafting a fake one. I treated it like therapy. I knew that I needed to learn a new way of being, and that would take time and a different sort of intentionality than I was used to practicing.

That’s the same kind of stage that I’m in right now. I am not in a place where writing can be my priority like it was. I’m not in a place where I can pursue it as a career, because if things don’t change, then I don’t want this cycle of stress and exhaustion to be the rest of my life. Of course, there’s a big part of me that is hoping that if I give this up, it’s just so that God can give it back to me renewed. But I can’t cling to that, because it may not happen.

It could be that this season is just a sabbatical that God has forced upon me to break my unhealthy dependence on my writing. Or it could even be a push to branch into some other area of writing, perhaps allotting more time to blogging or to writing music, both of which have always taken a back seat to my novels. In any case, now that I have ranted so long about this (and edited it down significantly; y’all are reading a much condensed version of my original verbal explosion), I am feeling more hopeful for the future. I know that whatever God is doing, it is good. Whatever He might be taking away from me is ultimately for my betterment. Whatever He may be giving me in its stead is undoubtedly greater.

In summation, this is just a phase that I’m in, one point on a ridiculously inconsistent trajectory, but it was worth recognizing and processing on paper. I’m already far more encouraged to try creating again, but I’m going to try to take it slow.

I think my next project will be to polish up the blog post that I was working on before this one and was hesitant to publish. It might be kind of a bizarre one, but I suppose some of you may find it interesting, so I might as well just get it out there. I’ve also been considering writing some thoughts on the name(s) of God. Something to keep an eye out for, I suppose, if only to see if I follow through. ;)

As always, thank you to everyone who made it this far! I so appreciate your willingness to devote time to listen to my rambling brain. I hope you all are having a wonderful June. God bless you!