I Stopped Writing, and My Life Grew

I stopped writing poetry in November 2020. I had written poetry, as well as I can remember, since I was 10 years old. Seventeen years is a long time to depend on something. It’s a long time to do something, and then stop. I’ve had dozens of poems and a chapbook of poetry published in the last eight years. If you’re in indie publishing, I’ve been published some places you might have heard of. If you’re not, you definitely haven’t.

I have reasons for quitting writing, although none of them seem satisfying. When I tell my friends I have stopped writing – truly not writing, not just taking a break from submitting, or taking a planned hiatus, or some other, timed event with a scheduled end – they stumble over what to say next. I’m so sorry? I’m happy for you? Why? Usually it’s just, Why?

And I try to answer: I was using writing to cope with my traumas by discussing them at length with an audience, usually in ways meant to shock or make uncomfortable; I never took the time to examine why I was writing, or how my writing was impacting my mental or physical health; I got tired of publishing, and realized I was only writing with publication in mind; and I’m tired. I’m just so tired. I’m so tired that I gave up.

I hadn’t written in months when I picked it back up last November, after a year of a heavy workload and immense personal change. When I started writing again, I noticed, after a dozen or so poems, that I was writing about a trauma that I had not discussed in therapy, and one that was showing up sideways, so to speak, in my work. I immediately stopped writing that collection. I wasn’t going to put my life in the window again, asking people to read and share my most personal feelings and memories when I hadn’t processed them myself. I couldn’t live that way anymore.

Why not? What changed? I think I finally made a life that I didn’t want to lose, that seems too valuable to risk. How many people have I written about in a spat of scorched earth? How many memories have I molded, twisted, and tossed into a work barely disguised to fit my narrative? Could I risk that, with my spouse, now, our little life together, my healing so important to me? I don’t think so.

What do I do when I’m not writing poems anymore? I’ve been reading. I’ve been exercising. In the first eight months of 2021, I read over forty books, an astonishing record over the handful I had been reading each year since I left university and started teaching full time. In June, we purchased a Peloton bike, and I have been cycling 150 miles a month, and doing yoga, meditation, and strength classes in between, taking time each day to center my mind on a task outside of my screens. I don’t throw my moods in the face of my partner or the world in a rage of verse just to regret it later. I don’t overshare as much to friends, even in private, and don't throw all my emotions into print and press Send. I am living a life that feels somewhat sustainable for the first time.

When I started trauma-intensive therapy in April 2019, I told my now-therapist that I wanted to dig up under the foundations of my mostly-stable life and fix the rotten foundations of my mind. Trauma rewired my brain, and kept it rewired. I wanted to live a more emotionally stable life, my day to day less tumultuous, less tormented by the moods I couldn’t understand. I wanted to stop having anxiety attacks and intrusive thoughts. I wanted, in short, to heal.

 We have worked together since then to help me do just that. And what I realized in November 2020 – what I should have realized, and what some longtime subscribers to my content may have already realized, long ago – was that writing poetry was me sticking my finger in the outlet of my trauma. By ruminating on the people who had slighted me, and the ways that I had been hurt, I was continuing the cycle of trauma without critically interrupting those cycles. Additionally, by creating and editing these pieces with an eye toward the audience, I flattened my own experiences, perceptions, and memories into something meant to elicit response. I was daring other people to react negatively, because I was reacting negatively to myself. I was not healed, and demanded people witness that unhealedness in a way that affirmed my ego as a writer and human being.

A few weeks after writing the first draft of this column, I wrote 3 poems. They’re handwritten in my sketchbook right now. None of them are about my trauma or past. I don’t think any of them are very good. Today, I saw a friend has been published in a brand new literary magazine, one which, on Twitter, is begging for submissions. I looked at my poems. I looked at the magazine. I thought, Surely, I could publish these here. But for what purpose? Maybe I’ll come back to them in a while and see if I want the poems in the world, or if I only want the world to see me publishing the poems. I think if it’s the former, it might actually be worthwhile.