Much of what we do in life is determined by habit. Habits are routines our minds perform when they don’t know what else to do: you get into a situation they recognize, they wake up and go “huh what?” and they do the thing they always do. You can deliberately build habits, but most of our habits formed unintentionally just to get us through the day, without regard for whether they helped us in the long run. There’s no reason to keep doing things that way, but you do.
Our thoughts have habits too. Most were formed when we were trying to avoid pain or fear and our brains came up with a short-term escape plan and then just kept using it. Some examples: did someone criticize or discipline you a lot as a child? Well, your brain, like a dumbass, said well, I guess we’ll just have to never do anything wrong again, as if that were possible. Were you convinced that writing was the only thing you were good at? Your brain probably said great! so we’ll deserve to keep existing as long as we keep writing perfectly. Like a fucking asshole. Your brain is not good at this stuff. It’s good at escaping tigers, but under the conditions of modern society, if screws you over constantly, especially when you’re a kid.
If writing hurts for you, your life has probably instilled a bunch of self-protective habits in you that now sabotage you without your awareness. In my last post, I described learning how to draw an ellipse, and how I had to learn to hold the pencil loosely. Before that, my thinking was, if I’m drawing something tricky, I must try harder, I must hold the pencil tighter and exert more force to make it go where I want. This did not work. So I had to do annoyingly counterintuitive exercises to develop a new habit.
Writing is like that. You have probably noticed a pattern when you write – you have an idea, you sit down, you start developing that idea in a particular way, etc. etc. – I dunno, your process could be anything. But whatever it is, those habitual actions trigger habitual thoughts and feelings – probably (if you are reading this blog) painful and self-critical ones. So every time you write, things end the same way. Maybe you always stall out 3,000 words in, or maybe you feel intense aversion to writing the moment you begin. To deal with this, you can’t go right in and change the thoughts and feelings. You have to change what you do.
Minds, for the most part, are a series of dominoes – see or hear [a], think and feel [b and c], do [d] in response, think and feel [e and f] as a result of doing [d], etc. If the final dominoes in that series are always “feel awful, hate yourself and quit,” you’ve got to rearrange those first dominoes, to interrupt the cascade of habitual garbage thoughts by changing what you do and perceive at the beginning.
For instance: say you always start by sitting down, opening a blank document and staring at it for a while, feeling increasingly bad about yourself, until you finally write something and start to limp along. What if, instead of staring at the document, you immediately typed a bunch of arbitrary words until you relaxed a little and some kind of sense began to emerge? And if no sense emerged, you just stopped for the day and tried again later, without giving yourself a chance to spiral down into self-hatred? What if, instead of opening a blank document when you sat down, you wrote some random shit in a notebook? What if, instead of sitting down, you paced around your house and dictated some thoughts and phrases into your phone and then transcribed them?
I don’t know exactly what would work for you. You have to examine your habits and find the things you do not because they work but because that’s just how you do it, and then see where you could throw a wrench in those works. You have to find those spots where you’ve always gone left but you could go right, and then try going right.
And – this is key – if the familiar anxious, self-hating thoughts start to kick in, stop what you’re doing. Don’t tolerate them, don’t let them run roughshod over you like they always have. That pain just teaches you the same shitty lesson that formed the habits in the first place. Stop and try again later, or try something else – see what other part of your process you could turn on its head.
Let me be clear – you’re not looking for a “new best way to do things.” So notice if you start to get anxious about “fixing” your process. That’s not the goal here. The goal is to find a path around your triggers, basically, so you can experience what it’s like to write without a garbage script playing in your head. If you switch up your process enough, your brain won’t be able to play you its usual bullshit song, because it will be too busy going “wtf, this never happens, what do I do?” It won’t have a script yet, so it can be trained to play new, better ones that don’t fill you with poison.
I’m making it sound easier than it is. The old habits won’t go away. They will return to feed you garbage, especially at first. When they start up, just stop what you’re doing. You can do that. You do not have to listen to the shitty song all the way to the end. Get up, go outside. Later, when the noise has subsided, try something weird like writing on your kitchen floor. Try anything that doesn’t put you back in the same circumstances that triggered the garbage.
If you’ve got heavy anxiety around writing, you might need to do this kind of thing for a while, without the pressure to turn out finished, public-consumption material. You might have to fill a lot of notebooks with practice ellipses. You may feel like you’re wasting time, but you’re not. (I mean, really – was the old way not a waste of time? I never used to finish anything, so I had nothing to lose.) Your only job at this point is to learn how it feels to write without suffering, and most people can’t do this as long as they’re still worrying about “making it good.”
If it helps, think of this as permission to write badly: you’re preparing to write well in the future. This shitty writing (if you need to think of it as shitty and not just as exercise) is money in the bank. As your doctor, I in fact order you to give no shits about quality as you build these new habits. You can’t afford to.
Great stuff, especially the suggestions on how to start when you are staring at a blank screen
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