I stopped writing recently. Not for long — but for long enough that starting again felt like breathing underwater.
This may be normal for many writers, but it isn’t normal for me. I may not write every day like I used to (remember those days?), but writing is part of my job; I don’t always have the freedom to choose whether or not I want to send my words out into the universe.
I stopped because I had to. I also started again because I had to. Sometimes life becomes unbearable and you have to switch into survival mode. And sometimes, writing becomes one of few things that reminds you why you should keep surviving.
Starting that first paragraph — after 20 days without starting anything at all — scared me. It wasn’t restarting, it wasn’t the subject matter, it wasn’t even the possibility that once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop again.
It was, as it always is, that inner voice that hates me.
The one that laughs when I try to take my job seriously. Every single day. It whispers. I can hear it in my sleep.
What if all this time I thought I could do this, believed it when they said I could do this, tried as hard as I could to get good enough to do this, and it was all for nothing?
What are all these words even for?
When you stop busying yourself doing the thing that makes you forget your fears, the terrors sneak back in. I used to be afraid I’d never be a professional writer. Now I fear that I’ve come all this way and it was all wrong and I was never supposed to become this in the first place.
If not that, then what? Who? Why?
Every time I take a writing break I contemplate never ending the break. It’s too hard, it’s too lonely, it’s too stressful. It’s too much.
Except even though it feels hard and lonely and stressful and too much a lot of the time, for me that’s how life feels. If writing were always easy, if living were never challenging, what would be the point?
What scares me the most is that I’m going to tell a really good story someday and it will extend beyond me and outlive me and that feels like too much power yet like being stripped of all the power you thought you had.
Maybe I shouldn’t let the fear of achieving something I may never reach stop me from trying to accomplish something that would make me feel alive.
Fear may actually be the thing that sustains my creative hunger. Everyone has something.
I am afraid.
I will keep writing anyway.
I am afraid because I want something, and to want something is to admit you deserve to dream.
Meg Dowell is the creator of Brain Rush, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words, and Not a Book Hoarder, celebrating books of all kinds. She is an editor, writer, book reviewer, podcaster, and photographer. Follow Meg on Twitter for tweets about nonsense and Star Wars.
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