Writers, Let’s Not Sit at the Typewriter and Bleed

One of the biggest parts of my personal development and therapy journeys has been tackling the ugliest beliefs I have about myself. And that’s my identity as a writer.

After a year of therapy, well, I can see where for a lot of us, the journey is more complicated than that. If you’re working to heal from any kind of internal wound, you might have more steps to untangle first than you could ever imagine at the beginning. But I don’t want this to sound deterring—it’s almost liberating to realize that you might be a little different from others. Suddenly it makes sense why things are harder for you and others find them so easy.

There’s a particular sticky spot I’ve found in the flawed avenues of my thinking.

No matter how much I educate myself or how many therapists say it, it’s hard to detangle self-worth from writing.

I’ll literally repeat to myself, “you’re more than your output,” but there’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s always thinking, “but that’s not really true. That’s just what you tell yourself to feel less depressed.”

In a way, it’s almost funny to hear these thoughts passing through my head now that I’m more aware of them. I know they aren’t good. I know they aren’t serving their goals. But if you feel similarly, then you also know how hard it is to change the patterns even once you’re aware of them. But of course, awareness is still that first step.

For me, these feelings of worthlessness are related to depression. It manifests in my inability to see my own worth outside of what I create. But even as I work more on my mental health, there are always other factors that influence how we feel about our output. In a capitalist society, it’s hard not to see our output as correlational to our self-worth when it determines how much money we have left after paying essential bills.

The problem with the toxic voice in your head is that it can be very logical and persuasive.

“You’re a part of the machine, you’re not a human being.”

— Halsey / Ashley Nicolette Frangipane

Forgive me if quoting a song lyric seems out of place in this somber piece, but that line from the song Gasoline epitomizes the dehumanization that we face in a society obsessed with output. While I’m writing this from the perspective of a writer with other writers in mind, there are a lot of fields and industries that put people in the same Schrödinger’s box.

Toxic thought patterns are so hard to beat since they usually have some solid backing. They’ve been clunking around your mind for years for a reason—in our perspectives, they make sense. Mine makes a pretty good argument. Thoughts of personal growth and kindness to self aside, when locked in a capitalist society, what is my worth outside of what I contribute externally?

Here’s an ugly truth—what seems like logic in our heads might be the product of negative deeply held beliefs.

I’m trying to challenge my toxic beliefs in two ways. The first is going to therapy. If you’re able to afford it, there’s nothing in this world that I would recommend more. I had many years of my life where I desperately needed therapy but couldn’t get it because of my jobs or lack of health insurance.

But if you can afford it, you’ve got to find a way to squeeze it into your schedule. The second thing I’m doing is reading more non-fiction by professionals in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. I recently read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD.

“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.”

― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

When we think something enough times, if it’s something that we’ve had in our heads since childhood, it’s really hard to even question if what feels like a resounding truth of the world might be false. It also doesn’t help that with this particular set of beliefs, believing that we’re worth more than just what we produce, isn’t a belief that gels with capitalism very well.

Changing the way you think and feel takes time + dedicated effort.

“As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”

― Bessel A. van der Kolk

And even once you have someone helping you to realize the fallacies in your thinking, it takes a lot of time and effort to really internalize those lessons. Being told isn’t enough—it doesn’t often create those miraculous moments of discovery where you suddenly understand everything. Instead, you take it in, think about it a little, see where it could be true. But it takes a lot more reflection and mental marination to truly believe and internalize those lessons.

Teaching yourself new, science-backed perspectives can help you find ways to think differently.

“Our true self remains deeply hidden, incognito, submerged beneath a web of mistaken identities.”

― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

I also decided to read a book on yoga, which I didn’t think would have anything to do with science and medicine—Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope—it sounds woowoo, but hear me out. When I picked it up, I just wanted to learn a bit more about the history of yoga. I didn’t realize the author was a psychotherapist who brought a lot of science-backed information to his book.

I find the most benefit from reading books by professionals in the field of psychology who have a great deal of education and work experience. While we could get into a whole conversation about the gatekeeping around the ivory tower of higher education (which is, unfortunately, a thing), I’m such a logic-driven person that learning more from professionals with research-backed strategies resonates with me. It’s a little helpful to read little articles online here and there, but reading fleshed-out books on these topics by people who have a highly specialized understanding of the human mind is teaching me to recognize a lot of negative thought patterns and beliefs I have.

There are many valid sources of information out there—and if someone simply talking about their experiences, like I’m doing right now—resonates with you, then that is a fantastic thing to take in. But in addition to that, material with a little more scientific backing can really help you understand yourself better.

Writers, we don’t have to sit at the typewriter and bleed. We can be kinder to ourselves.

Bringing this back to how all these factors down for writers—we don’t need to suffer to create. It’s a hard stance to challenge when we have famous quotes from the literary greats nudging us to create more… regardless of the fact that many of the great writers of our time suffered from mental illnesses that probably were not treated enough, if at all.

The reason I’m bringing up so many books, psychologists, and therapy topics in this piece is because we live in a time where we have more knowledge about the importance of mental health. As we struggle under the pressure to write more, do more, be more, we have another option. We can learn to treat ourselves gentler. We can learn to gradually break the toxic thought patterns and habits we torture ourselves with. It’s not easy work to do, but each time you show up and try, you take a step toward having a healthier relationship with yourself and your creative work.