An Exercise in Giving Up
I’m someone who always wants to overachieve.
Every year since turning 17, I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and finished a 50,000-word-plus novel in 30 days--and most of the time, I’m done by the middle of the month because I’m worried I’ll miss the deadline so I go ahead. I’m also currently 41% of the way on my challenge to walk the length of New Zealand, in only 32% of the time.
So, when I signed up for the Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang (TRSB) writing challenge this year for the fifth time in a row, I assumed it would be like NaNoWriMo--I would take the three months I had to write 5,000 words and get it done easily, just as I had in previous years.
I was therefore very surprised when I kept trying over and over for the first two months to put something on the page, only to get stumped. I came up with an idea I liked eventually, but whenever I sat at the computer and tried to write, I felt a writer’s block like nothing before.
It took until I finally forced myself to sit down and write a scene that I realized what was going on: I was missing my beloved tradition of calling Nana to share everything I ever wrote with her, and she would kvell over me and say I deserved a Pulitzer for every line and tell me how smart and accomplished and amazing I was for every first draft.
She didn’t care about the craft or whether the story was perfect; she just cared about praising me--and I didn’t realize how much I would miss that when the opportunity came to write my first story after she passed away.
I reached out to my therapist for advice about how to make myself push through and write the rest of the story. I had reached about ⅕ of the way, which I considered highly disappointing--I wrote less in two months than I always wrote in a day during NaNoWriMo.
I was surprised when she told me, instead, to reconsider whether this challenge was something I needed to do at the moment with so much else going on, and advised me to think about how I consider easing away from a project, let alone quitting.
I told her I felt like a failure for even thinking about it. I was always capable of so much more, after all, and I didn’t want to lose my ambition to do projects like these.
My therapist told me this is yet another example of the all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinking that my brain tends to favor. She told me that there’s no reason for me to feel like a failure if now isn’t a good time for me to do something even if I’ve succeeded before, and there’s no shame in needing extra help or time especially after a life-changing event like losing Nana.
I decided that I should give TRSB one more try, with a new organization system designed to break a big project into tiny steps. If this helped me and I was able to write the story, I would do it; otherwise, I would withdraw from the challenge and hope the artist whose work I was basing the story on wouldn’t be too angry.
After a week of trying, and even writing a little more, I realized that the more I pushed myself, the more I was hating the process--and that was the worst way to get back into writing after taking a hiatus.
And so, I reached out to the artist and let her know that I would be withdrawing and finding someone else to write the story. She actually found someone else before I did, and there was no harm done. She didn’t get angry with me, and none of the negative things I imagined actually happened. Since I withdrew before the deadline, I’m allowed to take part next year if I choose--so there are literally no negative ramifications.
My therapist told me that I was also allowed to take things easier with my walking challenge, which requires 5 miles a day, but I often end up averaging 7--and I even hit 10 some days. She told me that if I was going so far ahead to leave myself a buffer, I was allowed to use that buffer and not hit my goal every single day, especially since I’m still recovering from what turned out to be a bacterial infection of sorts and the walking makes me cough harder.
I’m still working on allowing myself to step back from something if it’s making my mental health feel worse, especially if it’s not something important to the course of my life as a whole. It can be very hard considering I’ve spent nearly all my life trying to push myself as hard as I can, but it’s also liberating to take a step back and realize that these extra projects are supposed to be fun and make me feel good. If they don’t, I’m absolutely allowed to take control over them, rather than letting them control my life--and find a way to feel good about my side projects again.
Michelle Cohen, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.