On Days Like This: When You Cannot Write

(From nonsense to sense: a lesson in free-writing )

Today I just want to be myself. Today, instead of sitting here at my desk, staring at the white screen and contemplating on what to write and how to write it, I just want to free write here and I don’t care if the form and the content won’t fit the blogging rules or all that crap I’ve learned in online or packaged ready-to-sell classes.

On days like this (symptoms):

When I’m low on energy and joie de vivre,

I don’t feel like writing anything. I become so self-absorbed and light-headed that it takes me more than an hour to load my life back onto my brain. Having to talk to someone would be such a pain in the ass, be it in person or on the phone. I like to be left to my own devices.

On days like this (diagnosis):

I have tried to observe myself in this process,

And have come to realize that it’s the way of my mind telling me to calm down and rest. It’s my mind's way of protesting against what I’m doing to it just like physical pain is the way of your body telling you to stop what you’ve been doing to avoid further injury to your physique. The mind, too, goes on strike. Poor guy is not able to speak to me in words — the language I understand — so it has to act out a mime hoping that I would get the clue: It goes cross with me to attract my attention, I, who’s busy running the everyday rat-race. It knocks on my door alarming me:

Hey, too much emotion! too much pain! too much thinking! too much distraction! too much effort trying not to get distracted! too much work! too many relationship problems! too much ego-centrism! too much self-observation! too much self-pity! too many unprocessed traumas! too many, too much, too much data to process! Give me a break, please.

On days like this (home remedy):

I just like to vomit and pour out everything on my mind on the page.

A vomit not from the stomach but from the heart, a compassionate vomit. It’s my way of tending to my mind. Having said that, the vomit doesn’t come by too easily. Emotions are always on the way: crying, laughing, anger, envy, pity … In spite of it, there is always a sense of relief in getting everything out. It looks like the job has gotten done, everything is out here in the real world and I am no longer responsible for carrying it. Now I can look at it from a distance …

My compassionate vomit on the page looks something like this:

I am so sad today/ sorrow is my best friend/ I don’t know why my dealings with the world outside are solely through sorrow/ it looks like that’s my reaction to every stimuli/ I might need to see a therapist about that/ I feel betrayed because I’ve betrayed myself/ I betrayed Sam too/ but that’s not what is chewing me from inside/ I feel tight/ I feel like I have to escape, to become free/ but that’s only the grass seeming greener on the other side/ I don’t know what to do with myself/ all this discipline, all this courage, all this hardship faced in the name of life … getting me to nowhere.

As you can see it’s a bunch of loathing and nagging which doesn’t make any sense. But who cares? I’m getting it out for my own sake!

On days like this (Treatment):

I have learned in this process that: as much as vomiting thoughts and feelings on the page may seem therapeutic and emancipating to the subject, it will seem irrelevant and jibberish to the readers. No one is interested in your notes of naval-gazing and self-therapeutic out-pourings.

I listened to my mind, examined it carefully, and comprehended that “on days like this” it is refusing to work as it usually does. However, it works in a slightly different manner:

Our minds are getting bombarded with millions of bits of words, images, and information on a daily basis. I have discovered that “On days like this,” when the mind is tired and exhausted and refusing to work the way we’ve programmed it, it is useful to try another method in free-writing: I try to write in bits and pieces too!

I try to write whatever comes to my mind. Sometimes I focus on my day (if I’m writing at the end of the day) or my yesterday (if I’m writing in the morning) and try to bullet-point some stuff that happened, what people said, what I thought, and literally anything. If this still doesn’t come out fluidly enough, I jot down things and objects in my surroundings separated by slashes. Something like this (I’m writing this on the spot):

Bamboo plants/ too many doors/ a cat named Descartes/ the old wooden Yamaha piano/ It’s snowing outside/ The color gray/ who says gray is ugly?/ I like things most neutral/ I don’t seek extremes/ sometimes I did when I was younger/ but now I prefer to channel my energy into staying focused because, after 40, I really sensed that life is short and I have a lot to do/ I envy the people who knew from the beginning what they wanted/ who were lucky enough to be one-dimensional, some of them great artists and successes today/ piano players, athletes, …/ but they sacrificed so much else/ Is it worth it?/ I couldn’t come to a conclusion/ whether to live and enjoy little things of life or to close your eyes on some things to become something and somebody?/ Can you even be somebody in today’s world?/What is the point of life? to become? or to be?

So, this last paragraph(?) is something I just came up with spontaneously.

There are some points and benefits here:

I can see all the red lines Grammarly has done the courtesy of dragging my attention to it but I don’t care because that’s free-writing.
The slashes really work for me because they tell me the last phrase doesn’t need to be a complete sentence with a full stop and the next one doesn’t have to start with something grammatically correct.
I don’t worry about the structure or the meaning of what I write in this phase, It only needs to make sense to me in the form of a raw note.
When I start I use concrete objects and simple happenings around me because I’m sort of out of it, not very focused on writing yet, and light-headed. My mind wanders everywhere and associates concrete objects with abstract images.
If you look at the flow of what I’ve written, you realize that I (my mind) have (has) started with concrete solid words like bamboo plant and snow and the color gray, but as I went along longer sentences started to emerge on their own making some kind of meaning. This is what naturally happens: the initial words are the stuttering of a tired, dormant mind — like a warm-up before the actual training begins — as the mind warms up it starts to flow more smoothly.
As you can see I took off from “the color gray” but could have easily done so from another word or concept.
This is far from a finished piece, but quite satisfying for a bad writing day. I can go back and work on it, maybe build on the last questions I have come up with, maybe expand the piece by adding the former words like “the snow” or “the bamboo plant”. For example:

Bamboo plants are stubborn life-seekers; although they’ve been bent and twisted along the way they don’t give up the courage to grow, taking only a small share of light and leaving the rest for the more in need. They are free from the busy world of the soil.

(If you’re interested in finding out how I have turned this concept into a “short form”, find it on my page, Mahgol J, under the title: “The Courage of Lucky Bamboos: An inspiration for gloomy days”.

Final thoughts

You may need to write more than a page of nonsensical words to get your mind flowing but as you practice you get quicker and quicker. Never think of your bad or sad days as unproductive days. Try this method and you will soon find yourself in the flow. And don’t worry if even no real writing happens on the first attempts, you will still feel good about yourself, unburdened and liberated, fresh and relieved, ready for the next day.