Writing and me: It's complicated

Behind the book: When a writer can't write.

Image description: photo of a gold fountain pen on it’s side on a white background. Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

I’ve said a few times that this has been the hardest professional year of my career. But it’s only recently that I’ve realized how much deeper it goes than that. Yes, for so many people, work matters. It is not only how we pay bills and feed our families, but it is also where we spend a large portion of our waking hours.

But when I’ve said that this is the hardest year of my career, I wasn’t really talking about work. Because I’m a writer, I was talking about my writing. And because I was talking about my writing, I was talking about how I communicate with the world. And as an autistic person, that has so many more implications for my life and my mental health than it would seem on the surface.

I recently became aware of a term that has helped me understand my brain in times of stress a lot more than I had before: autistic rumination. I made a little video talking about it here, but to summarize according to my understanding, autistic rumination is when autistic people experience conflict or feelings of hurt or shame or other unpleasant emotional things and they keep trying to pull it into rational parts of the brain to make sense of it. And in doing so we can keep hurting ourselves by reliving this painful experience over and over again in order to find a logical solution that often does not exist.

As I realized how often I do this and how much it has impacted my experience around my work this year, as well as baffling responses from many in the writing community to genocide, I realized that being unable to make sense of why people were doing what they were doing made me feel unsafe. And my work had always been a safe(er) space for me, just as school was when I was a child. It was a space where even if the social aspects didn’t make a lot of sense to me, the information and learning did. It was a space where my talents worked with much less fuss than in other spaces. It was a space where I could put in a particular effort and get an expected result. So where my work hasn’t followed those predictable patterns, I’ve felt unmoored and unprotected. And that has happened a lot in this last year.

In the days since this revelation I’ve realized that it goes deeper than that. My work is communication. Communication is something that I, like many other autistic people, have struggled with. It has always been hard for me to understand the rules of in-person interaction, especially with neurotypical people. It has been hard for me to feel truly seen and understood. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like an alien dropped onto Earth from space. I’ve been constantly watching the world, analyzing it, trying to see the patterns and codes in hopes of being able to join in one day.

And writing has been my key. Writing has been where all of my observing and analyzing has paid off. It has been the place where the traits that people often have called “annoying” or “weird” have been rewarded. My tendency to insist on clarity and specification has made me the least fun person at parties (not that I’m invited to many), but also has made me someone people have turned to on the page to make sense of complex issues. My feelings that people don’t tend to believe when I express them verbally are connected with deeply when I write them down.

My writing has been how I have connected with people and how I have felt like I’m a part of the world that so often seems to want to keep me at arm’s length. I have been able to write myself into life.

And this year, it felt like that all fell apart.

Writing has not felt safe this past year. Not at all. Every time I sit at my computer to talk about what I’m seeing or experiencing, I’m filled with dread or panic. What if this, too is misunderstood? What if this, too is weaponized against me or my community? What if this isn’t enough? What if it’s never enough?

And yet it’s all I have. I am in this world, I’m still watching and observing and trying to make sense of it. And the one thing that I always had to help me feel less scared and less adrift – it’s not safe for me right now. So what do I do with all this? How do I hold this world that is so terrifying and so confusing?

So much of what I’ve been working on in therapy this past year has been on how to not let this all overwhelm me or drag me into despair. I’ve done so much to be able to just get through this all, and I am here now able go through the motions of work, able to be with my family and show up at protests and all of the things I’ve done this past year, because of it.

But what I haven’t been able to say yet is that I’m heartbroken. I’m utterly, deeply heartbroken to feel estranged from my writing this past year. I wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach. A hole in my heart. Because my writing, one of my deepest, truest loves, has not been here for me in the way it was in the past.

I didn’t want to admit this to myself before. I’m nothing if not stubborn. I wanted to push forward like everything was fine. I didn’t want to admit that something so precious could be taken from me. But it has, to some degree at least, and it hurts, and it doesn’t help to pretend that it hasn’t.

This has been a brutal year. And my heart still hurts. But I hope that one day I’ll look back on this time and know that even with one of my safest spaces taken from me I was still able to get through. Maybe this makes me safer in the world in general to know this. I was still able to show up for community and myself, and as I said in my last post – I’m okay. I’m still here.

And still here, I know deep down, is writing. Even if we’re estranged right now, when I try to think of a way to process this estrangement so that I can move forward, this is still what I turn to. This is still what I have, the need to write it down. So perhaps this is how I heal this relationship. I take these small steps to write out where I am in this scary and confusing world, and hope that begins to connect me to you and to the world again.