Several months ago, I received a startling message regarding someone I used to know. I've never met the person who messaged me, and I’m not sure what compelled them to look into my life, or if perhaps it was a coincidence that they even became aware of my existence. I decided I’d rather not know.
My new knowledge of this person from my past had an impact on me mentally that I never could have anticipated. Up until the unprecedented conversation about them, they rarely entered my thoughts, and when they did, it wouldn’t elicit strong emotion. When I reconnected with some old school friends I’d been out of touch with for a while and they asked what happened to this individual, I responded calmly and casually, feeling rather detached from the situation.
Apparently, my threshold for coolly acknowledging this person is broken by having insight into their present life. It was like a crowbar had been taken to some locked door in a recess of my brain. Memories good, bad, and ugly that hadn’t seen the light of my conscious state in years seeped out in a slow, sticky stream over the course of days.
Late at night in my office, as I attempted to wrap my head around the next chapters of my novel, I kept finding myself sidetracked by the memories, regrets, and circles of questions. Trying to get back to focus felt like wading through a pool of tar. I lost hours every night in this process and hardly made any progress, though I believe having even one new idea is better than doing nothing.
I don’t mind taking a little time away from my manuscript to sort out stuff that’s troubling me, but I’ll only feel worse if I’m away from my creative work for more than, like, four days. That’s why I pushed myself to keep “showing up” and accomplish whatever amount of work I was capable of.
If you’re reading, chances are good that you’re a creative and have also had a mental block that impeded on your productivity before, or will at some point down the road. And if you’re not a creative, I’m sure you can relate to having a period of time when focusing on work felt like pulling teeth due to a distressing situation or a bout of depression. I guess it’s bound to happen to us all eventually. That’s why I thought this topic was worth discussing.
Throughout my life, I’ve usually taken on the role as the counselor of others, not the one needing counseling. I talk all this talk about it being OK to ask for help and then don’t take the advice myself. I’ve shaken off much worse, so I was caught off guard by how badly this particular thing bothered me, and ashamed. I kept telling myself I should be over it already, that I was being self-sabotaging and dramatic and nobody in my life deserved to have to sit through hearing me pour my feelings out about it.
After a little over a month of struggling to concentrate, I decided I probably needed to do more than simply try to push through it, because it’d been years since I’d felt that crappy emotionally for that many weeks straight.
So I finally opened up to my closest confidants about it. The conversations were difficult for me to initiate but got easier as they went on. I took a new life lesson away from our conversations: there are certain things I may never fully “get over.” The scar tissue around my heart might become inflamed from time to time throughout my life. Having my best friends help me admit that to myself, accept it, and know that I’m not wrong or weak for it somehow made it easier to bear and enabled me to slowly get back to my usual levels of concentration and productivity. I always try to give purpose to life’s inevitable pain through my writing, so I’m sure my latest lesson and the emotions that led up to it will find their way into a story, and in turn, bring about greater catharsis.
Do you have any experiences or tips on working through a mentally difficult time that you’d like to share? Leave a comment or DM me.
Oh yeah. I've very much been there.
I heard on a tea podcast—yes, I'm into that sort of thing—just today that one of the things that happens as we shift into adulthood is that we start to experience growing a past. I like that phrasing. For me, each year of adding to the layers of past situations, experiences and feelings make them more complicated and difficult to untangle. When I'm driving, making coffee or just generally spacing out, these feelings can easily create heavy spirals that are hard to snap out of, and if I let myself, I can be affected by them for some time afterward.
A couple of things that have helped me: I try to remember that I am not my thoughts or emotions, and my underlying reasons for having them can be valid, understandable, and completely unhelpful. (Always good to examine if this is the case.) I also remember that I don't want future me to look back on that moment and find I wasted entire hours on mentally shadowboxing with myself. I'd rather have done something meaningful.
Also, a friend of mine is fond of saying that to be creative is to develop confusion tolerance. I take that to mean that being blind to the full picture is often part of the human condition, so we might as well try to marvel at the world's complexities, including our participation in it.