Mental Health Before Writing

Self-Care For a Disabled Writer

I wouldn’t be the writer I am if it weren’t for the particular set of challenges that I have. The one who writes about my own difficult truths, one who tries to do it with sensitivity and compassion for the people who are reading it. I frequently forget to extend that same compassion to myself. I’m not unique in that regard. It takes real work to take care of myself. As a person who uses mobility aids (a walker or a wheelchair) there are everyday tasks that take extra planning–carrying laundry or lifting a bag of trash into a tall trash can. Those are also things that I can get help from another person with. It often doesn’t occur to me to ask for help when it comes to my emotional well being. 

Part of what I’ve been doing over the last year in my writing is letting go of trauma, and some of that was trauma about writing itself–about the damage that can be done when someone puts your work down to build theirs up. I started writing, and working through that trauma. I discovered that I still loved writing.  And this time, I got actual support for my work-there was someone there who said: “It needs work,” but without also telling me that I was a terrible writer or incompetent. Getting supportive feedback goes a long way in making someone a better writer.

Finding my Way back to Writing means Taking Risks

While I got better as a writer, a few other things happened: the writing got harder, because I was willing to dig a little deeper into what I wanted to write about and how I wanted to write. But I also started looking around for new challenges and new support systems. I needed new ways to measure my own progress. For me that meant joining a writing group, then writing regularly for a website. Next came an open mic poetry event where I read my own work, and recently I submitted a story to Lilith Magazine (having it accepted was a bonus–the challenge was really about submitting it.) The latest: branching out to a workshop with another writing-mentor besides Adam.  

My first project in my new writing workshop went well. I struggled a little to get started, but I finally finished it, and sent it off for feedback. We went back and forth with the piece, I made revisions, and when it was finished, a second assignment arrived in my inbox. I read the assignment, considered the two questions carefully, but I knew immediately that one question was absolutely not something I could handle, so I considered the second question. 

New Writing Workshop, New Writing Prompt

Just reading it, I recognized that there would be some serious challenges for me, but I had an outline in my head and thought that if I could take it slowly, I would be able to write a good response to the question. I finished last Monday’s piece (“Expectations”) where I explained the struggle I have with other people seeing me as a writer, started the Sunday Summary piece, and started making notes to respond to the workshop prompt. 

I started. And I stopped. I wrote a paragraph or two, and I stopped again. Over the course of the next few days, I found myself going back to the piece, writing a little, tearing it apart, rewriting and repeating the same pattern. I even opened up a completely new document and started over from the absolute beginning again, answering the prompt in a different way. 

As I went through the week though, I began to notice things. I spent a lot of time running my fingers over the note taped to the corner of my laptop-keyboard–the note by my right wrist that says “Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you’re not a writer. Keep writing.” I know I can write about difficult things. I know I can write when writing itself is the challenge and the words don’t want to come. None of my usual strategies were working here.  I get really frightened when that happens. Not only was I struggling to get the words out, II noticed that I was finding ways to avoid writing, or making excuses to justify not writing. 

Noticing my Needs

Noticing those things isn’t necessarily new. Noticing them and not ignoring them is a definite change. The same goes for recognizing that I’m putting off finishing things until I’m anxious and right up against a deadline. I am still putting things off; but I’m recognizing it now. Which brings me to the next step: wanting to do something about what’s making me avoid the work.  It’s not that I wasn’t trying to write, because I was trying. I could clearly identify some of the stories that I wanted to use to answer the question. Even when it came to the darkest, hardest part of the answer, I knew I could tell that story because I’ve done it before. 

Really though, just because I’ve done it before doesn’t mean that now is the time to do it. Or that that format or space is the right one or that the person I’m telling it to is the right one to receive it. I let this drag on and on through the week, excuse after excuse, one avoidance strategy after another. 

I started at least a dozen text or Facebook messages to Adam, hoping for a pep talk to remind me that I can do these difficult things, telling me that I know how to do this work. I think I deleted them all because I knew his answer wouldn’t be to encourage me to keep going. He would have (wisely) advised me to stop. I didn’t want to hear that. I didn’t want to deal with the guilt and anger I would have heaped on myself, I didn’t want to take a chance at looking weak or incompetent to someone else, and I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it on my own.

A woman with physical disabilities and mental illness has three reasons not to want to be seen as weak or incapable. If I’d asked Adam for help, he’d have pushed self-care, not persistence, and self-care is the harder path. Who wants to take the harder path?  

Inevitably, the day comes that I’m staring at a deadline, and I’m faced with two options. I could push through, write the piece, which wouldn’t be my best work, and just deal with whatever the emotional cost of that would be. Or I could acknowledge the effort I’d made, and my own limits and recognize that my mental health and my emotional well-being are worth more than that. 

I made a choice. I cried about it, and beat myself up over it a little bit. But I made a decision.  A good one. The right one.

Self-Care Sometimes Feels like Giving Up

Giving up on a piece of writing for now is not a moral failure. It’s not a reflection on my character or my skill as a writer, or anything like that. It’s not even giving up. Putting it away for later is about recognizing my own limits, my own value as a human and my own need for emotional safety. I don’t have to violate my own boundaries for anyone else, and if someone is  going to have a problem with that then I need to really look at how and why they’re a part of my life. 

I wrote an email to my instructor and said, “I can’t answer your first prompt this week, because there are other things going on that make it unhealthy for me. I’ve made an effort to answer the second, but  I’m struggling with it. I’m not going to finish it today, although I’m okay with continuing that topic.” It was a hard email to write. I worried that the words would be seen as a failure or a lack of commitment to the process or some other perceived weakness on my part. But that’s not what happened. I got an email back within minutes that told me to stop, and that the instructor would send another assignment shortly which I should just get back to him as soon as I could.

I wish I could have simply accepted that at face value, but I can’t. I wavered on it and said “If it’s too much of a headache, I can finish this one. It’s really okay, it’s just taking me longer than expected.” The response was swift and firm: Wait. There would be a new assignment forthcoming. I listened. I waited. I trusted. I trusted my own inner voice and that’s not something I do well. 

Success!

That new assignment came, and I wrote a little bit on Friday and a little more on Saturday. When I read it over on Sunday, I realized there was absolutely nothing wrong with what I wrote, but I wanted to respond to the prompt with a different kind of story.  When I trusted that voice, the same voice that had told me to acknowledge that it wasn’t feeling okay to answer the original prompt,  something wonderful happened. I let go and the words flew out of my fingers. I don’t know of another time I’ve written so many words so quickly, but I think I wrote about seven thousand words yesterday. 

I finished my response to the revised workshop prompt  and still had words to write, so I kept going working on other pieces. The words just kept coming and coming and coming, like a waterfall. I almost couldn’t keep up with myself. 

Concluding Thoughts

I have feelings to unpack about self advocacy, and about seeing myself do what I did. It’s a serious step forward for me that I I talked about recognizing my own need to feel safe, as an artist and as a person, and that other people listened and helped me to a healthier path than I would have picked last year or even last month. It wasn’t easy to do this. It won’t be easy the next time I do it either, and I am certain that there will be a lot of missteps along the way as I get ready to do it again.

I’m also sure there are some people who won’t respond in a positive way to my doing it. I’m scared about that–I know I have the support of people around me who believe in my need to advocate that way, but there’s fear, anger and grief about the way that taking on that advocacy changes relationships, too. I need to honor that. I need to remember to feel all the feelings.

It’s okay to make mistakes.

It’s okay that these are hard things to do.
It’s okay that I’m not okay all the time. 

None of those things make me any less of a person. None of those things make me any less valuable, and none of those things are reflections on my character. I’m not a disappointment or a failure because I am a person with real emotions and real needs. 

I did a really hard thing. I did a really good thing. I have a lot of work left to do, a series of big and small choices to make to get better at becoming the best version of me that I can. This time, I did the hard thing…the right thing. I hope that next time, maybe it won’t be quite as hard. 

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