Getting stuck is the process

I wish I could remember who said those words because they probably said a lot of other smart things I–and you–would like to hear. But I don’t, so the rest is me.

Getting stuck is the process. It is the inhale that makes possible the exhale. Without getting stuck, there would be no pause for reflection, no gathering of forces, no oxygen.

I will get stuck hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of times in my writing life. You will get stuck hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of times in your writing life. It doesn’t mean we like it. If you’re American, like me, our culture doesn’t like sleep, rest, reflection–any lapse in productivity and busyness, any step away from the consumer chain of capitalism. And apart from cultural messages, it is often frustrating–I have a story I want to tell and something is in the way. Often I am in the way. I want to go, be, do–not rest. Not wait. Not feel passive. We want control, but 90% of creativity happens outside our control, in the subconscious.

Getting stuck is productive.

It is a chance for our subconscious to mull things over. It is our subconscious saying, Wait a bit, I think I know a way to make this even cooler. To say, We’re working on the wrong book, poem, painting, dance, problem, project or We’re looking at this the wrong way or We’ve gone down the wrong road. It’s a chance for our subconscious to connect things our conscious brain would never connect. It’s a request for air, food for the creative process, material to incorporate, act against, emulate, inspire. It is a demand to stop, to grieve, to feel, to heal. It is the inhale.

So why am I writing about how to get out of writer’s block if it’s so natural and healthy, you might ask? for one thing I’m impatient–I want to get back to my writing as much as anyone. I want the high of creating and I want the soothing effects of an activity that helps me cope with my life, both in keeping me on an even keel mentally and emotionally and helps me make sense of the chaos of living. For another–the subconscious is subconscious. It is out of our awareness. It sends us messages in bottles that could toss up in years (not necessarily a bad thing) or that never arrive at all (I admit I don’t like that idea at all). Methods for overcoming writer’s block are a way to bring our subconscious creative realizations to the surface of our mind where we can do something with them, write them down, shape them, craft them and use them as a springboard deeper into our creative project.

I get stuck a lot. Between 1992 and 1999 I didn’t write at all, besides term papers, and I didn’t’ even miss it–not consciously anyway. I made a lot of dubious choices in that period, but hey I was young, I was probably going to make them whether I was writing or not. 2010 was a terrible year. Both my remaining grandparents died, my marriage was on the rocks for the first time, and we had that scourge of NYC living that I won’t mention by name because people who’ve experienced it cry and break out in spontaneous itchy welts. Id din’t write anything for six months. I didn’t write fiction for another six months.
Those are the big blocks in my life. There have been shorter blocks of months, days, hours or only minutes, and each time I’ve felt like I would never write again, never be a writer again. Writer’s block has often felt like the endless abyss of grief. It has also felt like beating my head against a wall, like the itch of a mosquito bite, or an absence. An absence of drive, an absence of creativity, an absence of inspiration, an absence in belief in myself, of ideas, of will, of clarity.

But if writer’s block–the power of the inhale–is part of the process, we all need some way to harness it, to manipulate it, to end it momentarily, to bring the subconsciousness’ creativity to the surface of our minds and onto the page. To exhale.

Over the years I’ve discovered a hell of a lot of methods to do so, adapted them, and created my own. I use at least one of these every day–and on some days I riffle through a dozen, looking for the one that will work, today, in this moment, in this inhale.
So here they are, the numerous weird, profound and fun thins I do to get myself creating again.

Check your health

I’m still writing about how to beat writer’s block, but since my journey took a weird detour, that’s where we’re going this week.

This isn’t a post about mental health, though I do talk about depression a bit; this is a post about body health and how it influences everything.

For the last month and a half, I thought I was depressed. Nothing was helping, not observing my thoughts and using cognitive behavioral techniques, seeing my therapist, spending times with friends, listening to happy music or exercising. Worse, none of my writer tricks that I’ve been talking about were working either and I COULDN’T WRITE. Which of course just made me feel more depressed and useless since writing is usually a way to keep me mentally healthy. I haven’t written fiction in over a month now. It’s been terrible and I’ve been blaming myself. (Yeah, I know, not helpful and not the only wall I’ve been beating my head against.)

It’s been terrible.

And apart from that, I was sick. Stomach problems are the worst (ok, everything is the worst when you are having it). (Side rant about food poisoning: it is the common cold of the tropics. I’ve had two colds since I moved to Thailand, but I had food poisoning four times in the first two years.)

So I went to the doctor. Go, me! I hate going to the doctor. She said, You have the same thing you had last year, SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth). I didn’t believe her, it didn’t feel the same, but I thought it was worth doing the breath test. She told me I had to wait a week, for certain medications to clear out of my system, and during that week I went on a restricted diet and felt a lot better, though not perfect and I was like, “Hot damn, the doctor is right, I have SIBO.”

So I was excited to do the breath test because ANTIBIOTICS are a fucking miracle, in spite of the test itself, which involves eating white food the day before (boiled chicken, fish or eggs and white rice with no seasoning besides salt and pepper) and then fasting 12 hours before the test and the 4 hours while the test is administered. You breathe into a tube attached to a plastic envelope every 20 minutes. It’s kind of cool, like a mobile pulmonary test.

Also, Thailand is amazing, they give you the results right away. But those results said: No SIBO. Devastation. Close to actual tears in the doctor’s office since no diagnosis means no treatment.

But I went home and my body was telling me, This is SIBO. I looked at my journals from last year, and my symptoms were the same. So I texted my awesome nutritionist from last year and told her what was going on. And she said, Hey! Fun fact, a lot of doctors think there are only two kinds of SIBO (based on the type of bacteria you have too much of) but now researchers think there is a third kind which doesn’t show up on the test and there’s no test for it. You might have hydrogen sulphide dominant SIBO. And then she went on vacation. And my doctor basically told me she didn’t believe in three kinds of SIBO, and I started feeling worse and worse and and there was a lot of lag time in there and I kept eating the regular SIBO diet because it had helped before. Meanwhile, don’t forget, I’m so depressed that I didn’t write an April newsletter, I haven’t blogged for more than a month on one blog and a month on this one and still no fiction. Wednesday night I felt so bad I was almost crying but I knew I had an appointment with my nutritionist on Thursday and I was really hoping she could help me again like she did before.

So we talk, and she says, let’s try the low-sulfur diet and I’m like, Why didn’t you tell me this before you went on vacation cause I’ve felt like I’ve been carrying a balloon in my belly and that balloon is made of pain. But I’m desperate so I go on a low sulfur diet and the first two days are awesome. My stomach stops hurting for the first time in weeks, I wake up with energy and not depressed. Here I was thinking I was depressed because I was sick, as a kind of side effect, but this felt like depression as a symptom. But it turns out that along with all the digestive problems of HS SIBO, brain fog and fatigue and trouble remembering things are legit symptoms.

I’m not better yet, because there are some bureaucratic complications,(and more tests, including the breath test AGAIN), but the low sulfur diet (with some further restrictions, like no vegetables–I was a vegetarian for 20 years!) is helping. I feel much better than even a few weeks ago, and for the last few days I have tentatively put down a few words of fiction in the morning.

It turns out the writer’s block was depression and the depression was a symptom of being sick.