If not writer, why writer-shaped?

A cage fight between identity and habit

Rough personal stuff keeps on coming. I thought we were through it at Thanksgiving, but in early December another frightening family crisis arose. It was all hands on deck through the beginning of February, for my immediate family. So much for writing regular Substack posts.

But it goes deeper.

I can’t go any deeper into myself right now (hullo, boundaries of this writing block).

Suffice to say that my deeply-ingrained identity as a writer and this recent set of anti-writing emotions—and habits—are at war with one another.

The original meme that inspired this post:

[Good question for curious animal lovers, but feels hypothetical… abstract… a fun discussion icebreaker]

My cry of frustration:

[Uncomfortably personal question for curious friends and fellow writers. As uncomfortable as broken concrete in its concreteness, and as chilling as glacier melt. My life depends on the outcome.]

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.

Like it’s trying to do with this one.

Damn it, I’ve been a writing coach professionally for 21 years, unofficially for twice that long. I help people defeat the grizzly all the time. Sometimes I step into their arenas and fight their grizzlies for them.¹ If it’s someone else’s battle, I’ll win. But fighting my own grizzly… my track record hasn’t been good this past year.

Is it some weird subconscious mourning of the death of friends and loved ones?² Is it the more conscious mourning of the death of American democracy, or of the Pax Americana and the unprecedented prosperity that came from it? Or something age-related? All of these things?

Perhaps. The thing that helped me to get this Substack post out was a drawing titled “How am I doing?” shared by my dreamwhisperer friend, Geoffrey Baines:

He followed his doodle with this question: “What’s your mountain of what doesn’t work?”

…and I sort of fell apart.

But it was the sort of falling apart that allows the words to gush out, too.

I’ll gush more later. You might want to tune out for the rest of the week if this isn’t what you’re here for; it isn’t the usual sort of thing that I post.

Right now I need to get back to the amazing mastermind/conference that is also playing a critical role in helping me to fall apart properly, so that I can begin rearranging my pieces into something that’s not just writer-shaped but something that will work again.

#WriterMBA25

1. aka ghostwriting, “comprehensive rewriting”, or “adaptive dictation”, depending on how it’s done.

2. my father, my uncle, my colleagues Tony Todaro, Helga Schier, and Sue Arroyo, my client Peter Kokh, the beloved patriarch of the family next door to us in Los Angeles whom we have known and loved for 25 years! And many other recent deaths of generally influential people whose deaths have diminished our world. It feels like death is kind of “piling on” unfairly somehow.