Greetings Stardust.
NaNoWriMo is well underway, and I have noticed a theme permeating the writing community, which especially became apparent in these last few days.
The struggle is real.
Many writers are despairing because they are not reaching their goals. Whether these goals are to just write a bit every day, or as lofty as hitting 150 k words in a month, not everyone is keeping up the pace, and it is affecting several on an emotional level.
Because failure hurts.
It doesn’t matter if you’re failing to reach your envisioned success because of burnout. It doesn’t matter if you’re struggling because you are having a bad mental health week, or if your medication is not right, or if life is just tossing every curveball imaginable your way. It doesn’t matter if you hit a wall in the plot, or if you had to stop and recalibrate because the story is just not what you expected it to be, for better or worse, or even if the story has lost its appeal to you. It doesn’t matter how reasonable it is that this year's nano is just not going the way you wanted it to. It still feels like failure when you find yourself falling behind.
And it's not just in November that writers face these struggles. Writing is a time consuming, heart wrenching process. We lose sleep over it. We shed tears for it. We find ourselves clutching our manuscripts to our chests, and resisting the urge to hiss at people who want to see what we’re writing, fearing it is not ready yet, and we hold our breath when we finally build up the courage to share. We receive harsh words from those closest to us, who don’t realize how much a passing comment stings, and that gremlin voice in our heads whispers that our story, which we devoted so much of ourselves to, is just not good enough.
That voice tells us we will never succeed. It says we are terrible writers, and we should give up. We have to push through it, and not only write a first draft, but write a second, maybe third, and fourth. We have to do this, often while working other jobs and managing the rest of what life tosses our way. These days, writers are often expected to self promote, a tall ask for people who are often shy introverts at heart. We are expected to be business savvy, social media wizzes, while writing, and trying to hold the rest of our lives together, and not panic or drown in it all.
How do we push through all this? How do we endure long enough to finish our projects?
The answer is resilience.
But what is resilience? To answer that, you need to think back on your struggles and read this next line carefully.
To quote Charles Hunt, “What if I told you, that you can overcome anything.”
Try saying this out loud. “I can overcome anything.” Say it again, and think about it. Do you believe it? Can you feel the power of those words?
In Hunt’s ted talk (listed below), he talks about how a life of trauma made him resilient, and how that resilience was the key to his success and his happiness. He talks about how it continues to be, and as a writer, an artist, and a human being, who has had to fight to overcome challenges my whole life, I resonate with his message.
Two points come up in his talk, each of key importance to what resilience is, and how you can harness it.
1: You cannot build resilience without being faced with powerful negative events. That means failures. That means life events you feel are too much to cope with. It means falling down and getting hurt. The reason for this is that resilience is the ability to adapt to negative stimuli. We don’t need to be resilient when we don’t need to adapt in order to find our happiness.
Writers: your struggles can help to make you stronger, and more resilient, not just as creative types, but as human beings. Embrace the fact that things aren’t going well, acknowledge it, be kind to yourself.
2: In order to utilize this resilience, you need to tap into the most important recourse you will ever have: your mind. I wrote my Master’s on this subject, and could honestly spend days waxing poetic about positive and negative loops, synaptic connections, and self-fulfilling prophecies, but for now, I am going to focus on the same cycle Charles discusses in his video. His words, “Sometimes, we need to tell ourselves what to think, when our mind starts telling us things we don’t need to hear.”
Thoughts, emotions, and belief, these are all interconnected.
It goes like this.
It starts with belief. Our beliefs impact our emotions. Those emotions impact what and how we think. Our thoughts direct our actions, and those actions manifest outcomes which then feed into our beliefs, and the cycle continues.
For better and for worse.
Positive loops are magical things. They carry us upward and to eventual success, and keep us sane through the rough patches. But negative loops can destroy us from the inside.How do we break the cycle?
By changing the one thing we have the most power over: our thoughts.
Consider Mr. Hunt’s words again, now.
“Sometimes, we need to tell ourselves what to think, when our mind starts telling us things we don’t need to hear.”
It’s not easy to silence the nasty little voice in your head trying to tear you apart from the inside. It takes intention, repetition, consistency, and determination. But if everytime you hear that voice telling you that you can’t succeed, you cut it off with a more positive thought, like “it's not going to be easy, but if I keep at it, I can get there,” then you will.
It’s the simplest thing in the world, and the hardest thing in the world.
If you keep telling yourself you’ll get there, and if you keep at it, then you will.
No matter how long it takes. No matter what life throws your way, you will overcome.
Best of luck to you in your journey’s Stardust.
I hope this post offers you some measure of strength against whatever turmoil you face in life.
Reference which inspired this post, and a video I strongly recommend for anyone who has ever struggled:
TED talk on resilience and trauma
‘What Trauma Taught Me About Resilience’ Charles Hunt TED talk
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