Hey, maybe I do have some hope of winning...
"If not writer, why writer-shaped?" part 3
This is part three of trying to figure out why I haven’t been able to write anything for the past eight or nine months (or whatever, I haven’t combed through my calendar to be sure). The fact that you’re reading this means I am making progress.
Here’s how I described it a few weeks ago, before my breakthrough on the first day of the WriterMBA mastermind:
My conscious self fights on the side of the writer identity, and it has won often enough to keep me in the arena. But over the past eight months my subconscious has roared up like a two-ton grizzly to rip nearly every writing goal to pieces.
Yesterday’s post ended thus:
I haven’t been able to coach myself out of my own paralysis.
Why?
Well, pieces are finally beginning to fit into place.
In that first post, I focused on the fulcrum moment, the tipping point, when I shifted from “cannot hit submit” to “this writer can write again, and publish too.”
But that moment wasn’t a thunderbolt out of a blue sky.
I knew something in me had broken, and I was trying to fix it while still coping with life. At first, last summer, I was pretty sure I would figure myself out soon and get back on track.
It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.
—Epictetus
As summer yielded grudgingly to fall and my writers’ block yielded not at all, I began to worry. Without a weekly Substack and at least quarterly newsletters to my main email list, how would I keep in touch with the people I want to help?
And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself, camouflaged by familiarity.
—Verlyn Klinkenborg
Would it be enough to just see people in person six times a year at writers’ events scattered around the country? No, of course not. I would be like a ghost, popping up for a moment then disappearing long enough to be forgotten before I pop up again, unannounced… like a bad server at a restaurant who never refills the water glasses or fix issues as they arise, then pops up at last—only to bill you.
You cannot run away from your weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
—Robert Louis Stevenson
A quiet sort of panic set in sometime after Thanksgiving, when unfinished drafts had piled up deep in Substack and Notes and critical emails had still not been sent. To say nothing of my own “writing for fun,” like short fiction, poetry, and the trilogy I began during my sabbatical. That stuff wasn’t just on the back burner anymore. It had been moved to the fridge, and now into deep freeze.
Even editing became difficult, and some days, impossible. I could still function if I were interacting in person, via email, phone calls, and Zoom, so I began to spend a ton of time with clients on Zoom (they didn’t seem to mind).
My favorite ancient wisdom wasn’t helping, either.1
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
—Marcus Aurelius
Yeah, I couldn’t figure out what exactly was standing in the way. The impediment to action was impeding pretty damn effectively.
If you want momentum, you'll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
—Marcus Aurelius
I “got up and got started” hundreds of times during those deeply frustrating (yet strangely numb) months. No, no momentum towards consistent and improving action. Ironically, I didn’t question—or even notice—the “you’ll have to create it yourself” part…
There were several sources of insight that began putting some of the puzzle pieces on the table at last, pieces that began to fit together at the WriterMBA mastermind. They include such disparate voices as Erwin and Alex McManus, EnneaThought®, Deborah Harlow, Steven Pressfield, Joby Harris, and even the Book of Common Prayer (despite the fact that I’m not a fan of “religion,” didn’t grow up in the church, and know very little about liturgical stuff). As I continue to figure this out, I’ll touch on each of them in turn. Meanwhile, back to last Tuesday’s turmoil…
I had neglected my own emotional motivations, convinced myself that hey, I had faced my fears long ago, and no longer needed to think about them. I believed my emotions would follow my actions, just as they had in my youth: you feel afraid to do a thing, you force yourself to do it, you learn how to do it decently well, and the fear becomes enthusiasm. That cycle happened many times in my teens and twenties, and that approach to overcoming (i.e. pushing aside) fear became part of my personal paradigm so that I never questioned it …even as it rang more and more hollow in recent years.
You know why I never liked scary stories? For decades I believed it was just because I have a more vivid imagination than most people. if I let myself get into a “genuinely scary” movie or book, certain scenes would get stuck in my head and torment me. The movie Jaws did that to me as a kid. I was afraid to get into a swimming pool. Aliens was another movie that messed me up: I can never be a surgeon. (Oddly, I’m still thrilled about human spaceflight and first contact with actual aliens…)
And there’s truth to that. I do have a vivid imagination. But that was just one reason, one facet of the larger truth about wanting no part of horror movies or stories.
Now I have uncovered part of that larger truth: I am afraid of being afraid. I routinely face down the small fears with great satisfaction, but I can’t even acknowledge the bigger ones, let alone explore them. My Id is actively hiding those fears from me.
My conscious mind has to go sleuthing after them like a detective, like an astronomer or a chemist, so that I can find them and defuse them somehow. Like I’m part of a bomb squad!2 Sorry for throwing so many metaphors at you but this is what this process can be like sometimes: you make educated guesses and test them, see whether you’re right, or to what degree the guess might be right.
My Id is hiding those fears from me, because it thinks—a visceral part of me thinks, subconsciously—that if the cognitive part of me figures out what they are, I’ll figure out a work-around, and I won’t obey those fears anymore. I’ll be vulnerable. I’ll suffer and die in some way, possibly literally (as far as Id knows).
My Id will invest unlimited resources to protect me from that suffering and death.
Superego is up here saying “the hands that clutch too tightly to the old cannot open to receive the new” and “unless a grain of wheat dies and falls to the ground, it cannot bear fruit,” and the Id hears all that and says “Fuck no. We are not letting Nic fall for bullshit like that when our own suffering and death is on the line.”
And when that part of me hears people laughing and mocking a movie scene that is horrifying, it recoils in shock. I never understood that odd twinge I felt when people would do that: you know, something like “Oh, yeah, that part of the movie? I just started laughing! It was so dumb, it was so fake. She was like, eek, as the demon impaled her on that altar, haha!”
And maybe some of those scenes really are badly crafted effects, and badly acted. But back when I was, against my will, familiar with some of those scenes, I did not think they looked dumb or fake. A good scary movie worked way too well on me.3 And now I realize that odd twinge was either one of confusion, confused concern: “That person seemed so intelligent. How can they be so stupid about the threat of suffering and death?”
But the Id doesn’t usually form clear sentences, not ones with modifying clauses, no complicated grammar for our deep emotions, right? So I felt the meaning without really thinking the words. And of course if I didn’t know the people laughing at the horror scene, it was a different sort of twinge: my Id thinking “Those people are stupider than they appear. Don’t stand too close to them. They can’t recognize danger even when it’s coded into a story.”
Because that, of course, is how the Id thinks. Not with sophisticated reasoning, like the Superego and Ego. The Id thinks only in story. 4If we want to change our Id’s mind about something, to get it to go along with what we want to do with our lives and stop sabotaging the rest of the team in here [point to your own head], we’ve got to find out what stories are fueling the simple emotional syllogisms that trigger all that fear, all that fury, all that sorrow and pain.
I got emotional just typing the last paragraph, and I’m not even getting into concrete examples yet! But my Id is paying close attention to what my analytical mind is doing right now. It knows I’m talking about it. And it knows I am finally taking it seriously, paying it the respect it deserves.
So the tears flow.
I know I’m another step closer to healing.5
If you’ve experienced something similar, let me know.
If all this sounds like childish prattling, you certainly should not dignify it with a comment.
I love the Stoics, but I’ve collected thousands of quotes that have resonated “wisdom” to me over the decades… I haven’t exactly scrolled through them looking for help, but because of my workflows they pop up now and then, at least every other week, usually more often. And until two of them double-teamed me that Monday night of WriterMBA, they didn’t help.
..and I need to find the rest of my squad! A great temporary squad showed up at WriterMBA, yay colleagues. I am acting on your wise advice already.
I only saw the “good” ones, the ones my friends absolutely insisted on dragging me into.
Story, and very basic syllogisms too. For example: Spiders = Agents of Death. therefore, activate full panic mode in the presence of Spider! (Agent of Death is the major premise, spider presence is the minor premise, full panic mode the logical conclusion until one or the other premise is disproved: “No, look, it’s just a piece of lint!”)
Or reassurance, or comfort, or whatever my Id hasn’t gotten from me in the past couple of decades. Perhaps “reintegration” is a better word than “healing”? I’ll ask my therapist when I meet them.