Two writer friends and I meet weekly online to fend off the creep of our self-doubts and encourage each other to publish.
“I just kind of went through a dark night of the soul,” one of them said, at the very end of our group call.
For fifty-seven minutes of our scheduled hour, my friend’s eyebrows had been knit in concentration, like he was silently working on some imaginary Rubik’s Cube. He’d been uncharacteristically reserved, and when I finally asked him what was up, he casually let us know he’d been awake most of the previous night grappling with a Medusa-head of questions about his professional life.
I begged him to share such existential challenges in the future earlier in our call so we’d have time to support him. But I also knew there wasn’t a lot we could do.
In the last two years he’d acquired a unique product, marketed it, and was hitting all the right notes for entrepreneurial success.
But then a mammoth global company (one that I won’t name, but is entirely guessable) lost thousands of dollars worth of his inventory, took no responsibility for it, and forced him into bankruptcy.
Now the conglomerate is dragging my friend through a series of postponed hearings, delaying a judgment on his case. Ironically, the misplaced inventory is an innovative phone wallet, designed to make it easy for you to take your money and identity with you wherever you go. Now his own assets are tied up in court over the same wallet, effectively making it hard to go anywhere with his entrepreneurial career.
Weird, right?
But the same kind of weird follows all of us around—producing ironies, paradoxes, and stories that are stranger than fiction; defying our expectations; and demonstrating how powerless our thoughts are to predict or control reality.
It seems we forget the context that pervades every aspect of our daily existence on this planet: that the universe is a freight-train of experimentation that we’ll never be able to slow down or derail, no matter how many pennies of thought we place on its tracks. The universe throws an obscene amount of diversity at the evolutionary wall to see what sticks. And we humans are just a portion of the raw material being flung at the canvas as it seeks to discover the next most compelling version of itself.
Feeling as though we’ve hit the wall is not a personal failure. Every single one of us is designed to be a unique experimental edge of creation’s adventure into the future of what’s possible. We could define authenticity as the bravery that is required to allow our experiment to unfold without trying to rewrite the script to be more pleasant, acceptable, normal, popular, or winning than it is.
Bukowski, Hemingway, Janis Joplin, Picasso—these are examples of artists who let their experiment run, untamed and unapologetic, on a road less traveled. Most of us aren’t destined to flame out in a blaze of artistic glory, but there’s something we can learn from those who embrace the creative chaos of their given humanity.
I’ve personally got 157 unfinished essays queued up in the back end of Substack that feel too weird to talk about. Going to a dinner party naked, traveling to India with my guru, being estranged from my daughter for four years, discovering I’m autistic in my sixties and more. I guard those experiences as though sharing any of them might instantly end my writing career, make my readers lunge en masse for the unsubscribe button, and trigger a notarized court injunction from Substack banning me from the platform.
The point is, we’re prone to questioning the legitimacy of our lives and experiences when they defy the established norms, and then step away from who we are, almost dismissing ourselves as an anomaly no one else could relate to.
This is a fundamentally important dynamic for every writer to understand, because it’s precisely this domain of weird detail that gives credibility to our words, and exactly the turning away from the raw material of our lives that results in writer’s block.
It was understandable that my friend looked glassy-eyed and faraway on our call. He was still recovering from the last two weeks he spent on the road clocking conference hours for the high-paying job that he both needs and dreads. The job that he will instantly quit the moment he’s on stable footing. The job that millions of other unemployed salespersons would kill for, that he feels guilty for hating, but still wants to ditch.
All of it is part of the experiment that he is.
As video conferencing brings the three of us together once a week, the triangulation of our locations covers more than 7,000 miles of space, yet when we’re on our call together, the distance evaporates and we become a fourth force, as though another whole character has entered the room. That character speaks truth through the random selection of one or another of our lips in a way it would never descend on any of us in solitude. We arrive at an unpredictable destination that delights us all each time we gather. Together we experience permission and freedom to share the experiment that we are.
All of this effortlessly occurs because of our friendship, which I’m beginning to view as the ultimate solution to writer’s block.
When someone cares enough to be attentive to your journey, where you’ve come from, and what you’re pursuing on the horizon—the details of your life suddenly become sacred. You see that everything you’re living, or avoiding, or loving, or grappling with is relevant, meaningful, and worthy of your attention. Friends help us to meet reality in the form of our story and then follow the details of that story to truths that are worth sharing.
“It helps so much to know that I’m not crazy,” my friend said as we listened and expressed our appreciation for what he’s going through, the integrity he’s bringing to his personal circumstances, and the longing he feels to pursue meaningful work.
Later that day, he posted an essay that included this observation.
The mind works in such a way that we become immersed in its commotion without knowing that we’re doing so.
In my experience, it’s this same mind that is responsible for writer’s block. The commotion of our self-judgment convinces us that little about our life is worth sharing, that we’re not doing it right, and that the experiment we represent is trite, inconsequential, and should be scuttled for something more substantial.
Writer’s block is just the interruption of our friendship with ourselves.
Partners on the path can help us reconnect to the significance of our experiment and encourage us to celebrate and share its detail.
As it turned out, there was a lot we could do for our partner. And it was really simple. Just affirm his experiment in the mood of friendship.
That is perhaps the momentary birth-point of every writer. The instance in which a person has the thought, “I’m not crazy, I’m just human”—and realizes that’s something worth writing about.
The three of us met Monday and on the momentum of our connection did a round-robin of mutual feedback and publishing.
Here is the work of our group from this week.
If you’re looking for a writing community that prioritizes human connection as the foundation of becoming a better communicator and writer—I’m starting one to embrace a wider circle of authors. Message me here if you’d like more information about the coming project.
I vote for those draft Substack posts to unleash 🙌🏽
This is pretty powerful Rick: 'Writer’s block is just the interruption of our friendship with ourselves.' Love it.