Do You Do Your Best Writing When You’re Hurting?
I’m afraid I do.
Some days, the words flow easier and faster. Ideas simply click inside my mind and effortlessly fall into place, building a structure that is as solid on the inside as it is beautiful on the outside.
Some days, I simply have a lot to say. Words pour out of me like blood from an open vein, like tears from my eyes when I can’t stand the pain. Words pour out of me and find their place on the page, where they belong. They take the pain and hurt out of my system and release them into the world, and then there’s nothing left to say for a while, until the next day when I’m hurting again.
Writing has always been the standard way I cope with my feelings, how I unburden myself from what weights the heaviest in life, in the hopes that I’ll find a way to go on. Lighter, more centered, emotionally stronger.
I not only write when I’m hurting, I arguably do my best writing when I’m hurting the most. There’s something about emotional pain that brings forward my most honest words, that is able to accurately describe my feelings, displaying them raw for anyone who would care to read.
As a full-time writer, however, I have to write every day, regardless of how I feel. And as much as I’d like my writing to succeed, I do not want to hurt every single day.
The image of the tortured writer is one that permeates our imaginary. When I was younger, I used think I would actually have to go insane to produce quality writing — that’s what I saw of nearly every famous writer in every biopic: they either drank too much, or had some sort of mental health issue, or both.
So I thought, “cool, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go crazy, and drink, and write like a goddess.”
Now that my emotional pain has been fueling my writing more than ever before, however, I don’t find it quite as fun as my younger self expected it would be.
No, I’m not going crazy — despite the fact that I almost became clinically depressed — and I no longer want to. Emotional pain, however, propels me to write, and the days when I’m not hurting seem dull and uninspired by comparison.
If you also write to relieve yourself from the pain, I salute you. I know you understand the process of opening up a wound and letting it bleed out so it can heal. It seems counter-intuitive to many, but it makes sense to you. Others would rather cover up their wounds, but you and I know that covering it up would only cause it to fester.
So go ahead, embrace turning your emotionally shitty days into great writing ones. I know I always come out better on the other side.
Yet, when the calm, happy days do come, write anyway. Write not about hurting, but about feeling happy — which is what I’ve been trying to do, too. (With inconsistent results, I must admit, but one thing at a time.)
Unless you wish to be marked as a bleak, emotionally destroyed writer your whole life, learn to write under the sunlight, too. Don’t be dependent of your emotional pain to write, or you’ll keep yourself under unnecessary psychological strain just to reap the “benefits” on your writing.
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself, anyway: you don’t want to hurt every day, you don’t want to depend on how much you’re hurting to do what you love.
It’s tough to break the mystic of hurt, the fetichising of pain as ideal fuel for great writing, but it’s possible — I have to believe it’s possible.
As a writer, it’s useful to understand a large range of emotions, and even to know how to channel them on occasion, but to become addicted to bleak moods and dark feelings is a dangerous game.
One I’ve been trying not to play anymore.
