for the days when writing feels hard 🌧️

have the courage to press pause ⏯️

I’d love to make my newsletter a bit more conversational. Feel free to hit reply and write me a challenge that you’re facing when it comes to your creative projects. Of course, I’m also glad to read about the joys and pleasures of them. How have you been able to call back your creative energy lately? Let’s learn from each other. 📖

This is something I’m offering to both free and paid subscribers at the moment. 🌖

Thanks to the lovely poem who has been courageous enough to take me up on this:

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Hi Imọlẹ,

I’m struggling with having personality to my writing. Lately, it feels very uninspired and robotic (probably exacerbated by seasonal depression). Curious to see if you’ve dealt with this, and how.

Sending my best,
anonymous poem

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Dear poem,

first of all, thank you for writing me and trusting me with your question. I have been feeling a bit nervous to reply, because I truly didn’t want to give unpractical advice or dismiss your experience in any way. At the same time, I know that being in conversation with others about our challenges can reveal something about them to ourselves that we didn’t consider before. I can honestly say that I’m not writing to you from a high horse. Rather, a “lazy” little pony. However, this “lazy” little pony might not be to blame. Depression might be our bodies way of forcing us to take care of ourselves and to rest. Listening to what my depression was trying to tell me has been my ticket towards a life that feels more aligned to my soul. There have been many times in my life that I’ve wanted to write more than I had the emotional and physical capacity for. Sometimes I’m grieving how much of my life has been swallowed by depression, but that’s also not the whole story. Depression has been what has transformed my life so that I have the space to write. Writing isn’t a linear process and we don’t need to write a lot consistently for our writing to matter. What we do need, I believe, is to develop our personality in order to write. One major way that we develop our personality is through adversity and falling “behind”. When we do, we can no longer just follow what everyone else is doing. We literally can’t. Our bodies don’t allow it. We have to make peace with forging a different path. That’s wonderful actually, because then we get to know who we are outside of peer pressure. Anytime depression hits, I have to hit pause and find what gives me energy again. Can you see how depression can actually be the key to developing a unique personality?

Depression can be the very thing that makes our writing come alive, if we trust the process. Depression is the best friend of change and introspection. Maybe, just maybe, depression makes us the unique writers that we are. There’s something about depression that is extremely compatible to writing. We don’t need to leave the house. We don’t need to socialize. We don’t need to be perceived in the same ways we would if we were posting videos or photos of ourselves. We can write from the comfort of our couch.

Depression has been my seasonal companion too, making itself so comfy in my life, it seemed permanent at times and I’ve been diagnosed with a personality disorder. If you’ve been reading my previous posts, you know how I feel about the label of borderline personality disorder. I’m not a huge fan. However, I also wanna set queer that I absolutely believe that the symptoms are real, I just don’t agree with the label. As I’ve recently been reminded, 70% of people who are diagnosed with borderline don’t have the symtpoms anymore after six years of therpay and 99% after sixteen years, which points to the possibility that it isn’t actually a “personality disorder”, but rather trauma. Yet, this is a very contested issue, so feel free to form your own opinion. Something I used to say when I first started therapy is that I’ve felt like a cloud has been following me around anywhere I went, ever since I was a child. Pouring down on me while it left others dry. This sense of isolation and loneliness is typically associated with depression. This, “I’m so different. I’m uniquely embarrassing.”-feeling. That, of course, can be one of the bitter experiences of being depressed. How much solitude is necessary for us to develop our unique personalities and how much leads to isolation? Sometimes, depression can be a sign that we’re part of communities that are misaligned. Sometimes having the courage to go it alone for a while can be what leads us to our unique writing voice. I no longer see these clouds as that much of a disturbance, but rather as childhood friends. We’ve grown apart a bit, but they also remind me of way back when. I can find comfort, even on rainy days now. Sometimes the rainy days are the coziest ones. It’s when you cuddle up in a blanket with some tea. I have to admit that this sounds a bit too romantic to be true. Am I perfect with this? Absolutely not, but what I’ve learned is that when you try to fight depression, depression always wins. Fighting depression is like fighting yourself.

To give you a very current practical example from my life: If you’ve been reading along, you might have read that I just recently went through a very vulnerable process of not getting an autism diagnosis, although I have valid reasons to believe I’m autistic. I opened up about my trauma, my quirks, my social struggles, my sensory issues and it was extremely triggering for my body to be denied the validation of an official diagnosis. So, the first thing it did was to collapse. I had what could be an internalized meltdown right in front of the psychgologist: with difficulties breathing, speaking and moving. I had flashbacks of the times in my life that felt extremely autistic to me. My body knows. My body knows. My body knows me. What helped me not completely spiral, so that they could call my sister to pick me up, rather than the ambulance was that I had a very stubborn internal voice that said: “But I AM autistic.” What followed is that my body has been amplifying all of my autistic traits, maybe as a way to validate me from within. I’ve been even more sensitive to light than before, manically drawing my curtains open, just to close them again, just to open them again a tiny little bit for the perfect amount of sunlight and shadow. I’ve been finding going to social events so difficult that I walked right in and out of one I was invited to. My body has been telling me that it just cannot cope with taking the public transport anymore, so I had to either walk, take a taxi or borrow a public bike. I did that right when it started to hail. The Universe does like to prank me. I could have pushed myself, fight these depressive autism symptoms of heightened sensitivity and social anxiety, but instead I honored my body. I just picked up a used bike I bought, something I’ve never quite found the time to do. I always had excuses. It never felt like a priority, until my body now said: “No more screeching metros, please! Protect me from crowded masses!” I’m starting to feel grounded again thanks to listening.

My new friend. I don’t have a lock yet. I once asked an autistic person I met at a protest how they coped and they said by taking the bike everywhere. Ever since then, their advice hasn’t left my mind. Riding the bike does make living in the city feel a bit more like living on the country side. It’s worth a try. Before I was told by a friend years ago that I could be autistic and experiencing ableism, I never truly considered how much noise drained me. Denying suffering doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means it’ll make itself known in other ways. Years later, here we are.

I know that having a cognitive disability like autism/ADHD and depression aren’t quite the same, but they can reinforce one another. That’s why as I’m writing I’m noticing that I cannot seperate one from the other that easily. Forgive me, if any of this doesn’t apply to you or feels irrelevant, but who knows, maybe it does. The strategies of self-care I discover when I’m at my most depressed, activated and dissociated stay around and are useful to me way beyond these painful seasons. Depression can be a self-care bootcamp teaching us the skills of resilience. When the Covid-Pandemic hit, I was way more prepared for it than my peers who hadn’t experienced depression before. I knew quite well how to live in isolation. I don’t want to romanticize any part of being depressed, just offer a different lens. I’m not someone to deny that there’s a very biological out-of-our-control element to depression. I’ve arranged an appointment with a psychiatrist next week, because I also want to explore medication to help me with insomnia, which I’ve never truly done before. It’s as hard as trying to lift a car with sheer manual force to heal without support.

It might sound like “lazy” little pony advice, but when I don’t feel inspired to write, I don’t write. To me, the lack of inspiration to write indicates that I need to connect to what inspires me, outside of writing. You might have noticed that I have breaks in writing this newsletter. I’m not consistent. Otherwise, I might truly start to sound very robotic and uninspired. Forced. Whatever people might perceive as personality in my writing is me processing life through my writing. Writing is a sieve where I pass my existential questions and anything I’m truly struggling with through. Over time, I’ve realized that if I’m struggling with writing, writing about struggling with writing can become the very portal to overcome the shame around it, which then allows me to write with more ease about other topics again. This can be applied to any other struggle: If you’re feeling shame, write about it. It doesn’t have to be publicly. If that doesn’t work, take a step back and do something else you’re passionate about. Don’t put a timer on it. Say to yourself: “I might never write again and that’s okay, because I have or can find other things that fulfill me.” In most cases, you’ll naturally wanna come back to writing. Sometimes, immediately even, because the pressure is gone. That has been my experience.

I wish you all the best on your creative writing journey.

May you find inspiration in the most mundane of things.

May your seasonal depression become a comfy friend.

Do feel free to discard my advice, if it doesn’t feel right.

If you want to dive deeper with me, I’m offering 1:1 sessions again. I’ve recently updated my website to make it easier for people to book sessions with me who live in a different time zone. I know this has been a struggle before. Now, the schedule will be adjusted automatically to your time zone. Also, I recently got a job as a learning coach (yay!), so it feels like I’m going through a creative transition in general.

Something that helps me stay inspired in my writing is that I always allow myself to change. We don’t have to stay the same. Maybe our depression asks us to be someone different.

Do check out Embodied Learning.

Love,

Imọlẹ

PS: Despite a “ceasefire” Israel has started bombing Palestinians again. Consider supporting Workshops4Gaza — a group of autonomous writers, artists and educators organizing workshops and classes to raise money for Palestinians in Gaza. 💔

PPS: If you can, use Ecosia, instead of Google. I do too. For the Congo! ❣