I touched the abyss this weekend. I realize that now…and it actually made me feel better. I know that’s weird to say, but this is how…
The abyss, it would seem for me, is working, working and working and not making progress. It’s being stuck. Not moving forward. Not being productive. It’s nothingness.
And touching that this past weekend helped me see that I’m not stuck. I am actually making progress. Finally. It is actually different this time, and for at least a couple concrete reasons, chiefly of which I was reminded of today:
I look forward to my writing sessions.
I…cannot tell you how incredible that is. It, in and of itself, is a game changer. And that helped me realize that the key to my productivity is the joy and the love. And I definitely have had that on my radar recently…but this experience this weekend of feeling really low and lost actually helped highlight in stark relief for me what the way out is, and in a very specific way:
I just need to find the one exciting thing about each scene I sit down to write, the one thing that I’m looking forward to and is going to suck me into that piece of the story. That’s it. Just that one thing. And if I have that, I can write it, I can be connected to it, I can explore and have fun with it…and then because I was connected, I can edit it and refine it.
Without that connection, I’m lost. I don’t even know how to revise what I’ve written. And I’ve done a lot of THAT kind of writing over the past two years, and that, in a nutshell, is where I went wrong before, and what I’m doing right now.
I’d never have thought that making contact with the darkness like that would have helped me feel better, but it has. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before. And maybe I’m just riding a wave of compensatory euphoria after hitting some decently deep depression.
Perhaps.
But I don’t think so. It feels like progress.
And that’s all I really need. I know that now.
We’ll see.