Dear Writer,
Oh my god, I’m writing this at the absolute last minute because I kept thinking, “I have time to write this week’s Dear Writer,” and Dear Writer… I ripped right through that time like a skier on fresh snow.
So… prepare yourself. I’m just gonna keep typing and we’ll see what shows up.
So, I mentioned last week that I’ve been trying to learn TikTok. I’ve since populated my feed with a couple of videos, and spent the rest of the time just scrolling and… wow.
For those of you who aren’t using TikTok, allow me to describe it thusly: TikTok is like someone boiled a distraction carcass in water for hours until they had a nice strong broth going, and then mixed in about half a bottle of short attention span with two heaping spoonfuls of exhibitionism, then simmered it together until it condensed a powerful demi-glace of pathological impatience and then drizzled it over a steaming hot—oh!
Hey!
Someone’s dancing!
Now, that’s not to say that I don’t like TikTok. I mean, for someone with my total lack of patience, it’s kind of made to delight me. The competition for attention there is so fierce that people tend to get to the point pretty quickly, but the strategies different creators employ to grab a user’s attention is kind of fascinating. And while it’s frenetic and if I’m on it for more than 15 minutes I start to feel a little Clockwork Orangey, I’m learning lots of things about lots of things.
Mostly, that everyone’s got mental health issues.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m not judging. I’ve got mental health issues and of course everyone has mental health issues and everyone should be in therapy the way we go to the doctor or the dentist but that’s not what got me thinking. What got me thinking was how mental health issues affect writers, specifically.
I talked in another Dear Writer letter about how our writing is made from our soul stuff, and that got me thinking about mental health and how it can have a serious effect on my ability to write. Some people create from their pain, so when their mental health is good, it may make it harder for them to access the material they want for their work.
I’m not one of those people. I create from the light and the joy and the fun. My darkness shuts it all down. Which is why I haven’t finished anything in so long. I mean, yeah, I’m busy and I’ve got a million things in the air, but that was also true when I was writing two books a year. What happened to me was that things got darker, and the writing got harder for me, to the point where it was almost impossible.
Now, things are better. I can write, I can read, I can listen to music, all stuff I couldn’t do for a very long time. I’m still a little bit dead inside, compared to how I was before when I felt everything completely, but even that needle is shifting.
What am I getting at? I don’t know. I clearly have not thought this week’s letter through. I guess it’s just that if our creativity is connected to our mental state, and we don’t acknowledge when our mental state is being challenged, we can decide that we’re just being lazy when we feel like we can’t write, like what we need is tough love instead of self love.
Which reminds me of a TikTok video I watched recently. The creator is trans and non-binary, and when they started talking, I was just interested. I thought they were beautiful, and they had kind eyes, so I hung out to hear what they had to say. Then, they said this:
“If you are inspired by me and think that I am beautiful, that is because there are parts of you that you see in me that deserve to be celebrated.”
And I started crying.
See, my kindness and love flows one way; outward. Then this beautiful motherfucker, out of nowhere, just takes my kindness and love and shoots it back at me, from me, and… you guys.
I have never felt my own love like that before. Is that what self love feels like? Because it’s kind of awesome.
Anyway. The whole point is, nothing we do is made better by being tough and harsh and cruel with ourselves.
For instance, right now, I’m looking at this message which I’m writing at the last freaking minute and I’m thinking, “This is completely disjointed and I don’t even know what kind of point I’m trying to make and what am I even talking about?”
But maybe there’s something of value here anyway. And maybe if you see it, you can also see the value in what you’re getting up to.
Everything,
L