Why didn’t I write?
28 Mar 2024
In this post, I try to explain why I haven’t published anything significant in the last two months.
I’m writing this post on a Thursday morning after I oddly woke up almost 90 minutes before my usual wakeup time. Since it’s started to get hot, my body temperature rose, and I lost my sleep at 7 AM. Within five minutes, I was out of my bed, even though I had less sleep than usual for the night.
During the morning business, I was wondering what I should start my day with, and I thought of reading. I am currently reading “The Kite Runner”. However, writing seemed like a better option because the rest of the day will be lined up with many distractions, and I’ve not been able to handle those optimally these days. Also, I woke up to the sad news of the demise of co-author of Thinking, Fast and Slow-Daniel Kahneman. I have mad respect for his work, so this isn’t great news to start the day. Reading up about him in some of my book notes took about 30 minutes. After mourning his loss, I’m finally writing this.
Writing this feels odd, as I actually don’t have the internal drive as I used to have before for writing. It’s also not like I wasn’t interrogated by some people who were wondering — where are you and why haven’t we seen you writing?
I didn’t have a clear answer to the question, but here’s what I said: I just didn’t feel like it.
Some more reasons include:
- Attending a quiz fest in a different city
- Attending a concert the next week in the same ‘different city’
- A war-like serious mouth ulcers outbreak
- Understanding more about oral health
- Getting some cavities filled about which I had not known if it hadn’t been for the ulcers
- Learning ukulele and spending more time with it
- Making spontaneous visits to friends’ homes
- Reading some great books
- Listening to good music
- Needing time to reflect on how I spent time this year so far
- Interesting new projects at work
- Knowing there are many who write just like I do but I don’t know them and their work at all
- Busy playing quizzes and meeting some new folks through them
- I was busy having great conversations about lots of random things
Spending hours in any creative endeavor is a daunting process. People do it for various reasons, and the biggest reason they do it is because they like doing it for themselves. It’s a form of self-expression, therapy, their identity and who they were at a point in time. Like this piece, the thing I least care about is how many people will read this piece and what I will get once I write and publish this somewhere (whenever stated, such a statement actually means someone cares about that thing :p). You shape your identity, and your identity is personified through the art.
But we must not miss that spending deep hours in any creative work is also a very dark process. I’ve written about how some of the writers in the past had terrible life. People say they did virgins; what could be worse than that? Being so good at something and not being able to experience arguably the most intense human experience sucks.
Amit Varma says writing typically doesn’t happen in an air-conditioned building while wearing the finest clothes sipping on mocktails. Instead, it’s something you do in the secluded, swanky basement of your home, with just a ray of sunlight streaming in through a broken, barely-standing wooden roof. There you are all alone. You write best when you delve into the hidden corners of your brain, exploring the concealed secrets and burning questions, observing what others don’t, feeling what others don’t, and delving into your deepest, often uncomfortable, parts. It numbs you, and is similar to the aftermath of a traumatic event, you observe things with the emptiness just like watching a leaf that is moving by the wind or gazing at the stars.
So, why haven’t I been writing these days?
- I’ve been having a happy time in life, doing things I spontaneously enjoy
- I’ve chose not to plan things for the long term
- Because I realized the probabilistic chances of my writing paying me anything in the long term are very slim
- I didn’t have enough material to write about
- The topics I thought about writing were not important enough
- I needed time to think about writing, and perhaps rethink it
- Was busy defining self-care for myself because a friend commented, I had caught on some dust
I won’t say that I didn’t write because I had hit writer’s block. Perhaps now, in hindsight, it was a conscious enough decision. One needs to take a pause and look back time to time.
I didn’t write because I didn’t want to spend time in the swanky basement of my house. But hey, looks like now I’m back. I didn’t write because I needed life fodder so that I could write more. I didn’t write because I was living my life or as I like to call it these days, life was happening to me.
You may check out everything I wrote between June 2022 and November 2023 on this page; I then moved to this platform.
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