Radio silence

Sometimes you just need to step away.

I won’t count the current number of abandoned draft posts that make up my digital clutter (and if you’re reading this, amen! it hasn’t joined them!). Posts on sobriety and giving up alcohol, thoughts on being two years post-brain tumor, stream of conscious confessionals, examinations on how to be a child-free friend to my friends with kids, and general rants on the current state of society and how much I abhor the social media scroll.

They very in length from a line or two to two hundred, born from an energetic spike, my fingers skittering over the keys before swiftly X-ing out the screen in disgust and wondering who the fkk would ever want to read this.

And that is the problem.

My writing was no longer my own.

For the majority of my 10+ year career I’ve collected paychecks sprouting from words, each one at a cost to my clients or a company. I knew I “arrived” as a writer when I submitted an invoice carefully calculated by the total number of words and it paid for part of an international vacation. A month of rent. A brand-new wetsuit.

What have those paid words cost me?

Most days I’d rather eat dirt than open my computer outside of self-deemed work hours. Creativity? Shot. My voice no longer sounded like my own, too heavily influenced — rather than inspired — by everything else I saw out there.

Week Four of The Artists Way calls for total reading deprivation. This workshop for unblocking creatives of all kinds was first published in 1992, pre-internet and way pre-social media. I wondered what the modern day equivalent might be as I balked at the thought of setting down my beloved books, even for a week. (I now see the online course calls for “media deprivation”). Instead I set down my phone, deleted Instagram, turned off the TV, and turned inward.

At the end of that week rather than get back to writing, I relieved my self-imposed pressure and decided to back off.

Instead of adding checkmark to-dos for posting Substacks and picking back up my Google doc novella drafts, I took pen to paper and ultimately realized I had fallen back into a depressive episode. I was in the thick of experiencing and deciphering for myself the very meaning of the posts I was trying to create and explain outwardly. Instead, I needed to go in and make sense first for myself.

And as I learned in my college Autobiography 102 course, there is such thing as being too close to your own material.

So where are we now.

Josh and I just returned from a 10-day trip to Japan, two blissful work-free weeks of exploration and deep rest. Anxiety, gone. Depression? Don’t know her! And while I’m still adjusting to being back, I feel refreshed in a way I haven’t in a long time.

It’s been over a year now since my last drink, and I’m experimenting with a total sober October — bidding even cannabis adieu while I examine the effects of every substance, pill, and potion I put into my body on my mind and my body. It’s been two years post-brain surgery but recovery is still a daily commitment, or rather — a daily submission. And I refuse to carry the label of chronic anxiety and depression around, seeking instead ways to lighten my load, turning inward and outward for the help and support I need to live content. Healthy. Free.

So cheers to continued recovery, whatever that may look like day after day. Choosing health seems simple, straightforward. But when we live in a society that tries to sell us wellness by the bottle and working harder as a remedy, it gets confusing.

Sometimes all you can do is strip the excess away. Turn down the noise. Return pen to paper and see just what comes up.