Though still groggy, snotty and discombobulated with jet lag, I’m pondering on how the trip to the UK from which we’ve just returned was by far the most positive and healing I’ve had for a very long time. Realisations and discoveries that have successfully eluded me released tiny triggers in my brain and a few pieces of the chaotic mental jigsaw felt their way cautiously around one another before cautiously interlocking.
Being back home was strange. An experience that usually winds me up into ever tighter emotional knots instead helped me understand myself a little bit better. The breakneck 19 days found me pushing envelopes I usually fight to keep static, confronting triggering places and situations, but also opening myself up to different ways of experiencing joy and carefully inching out the rolled dough of my patience, all punctuated – it must be said – with large quantities of booze and the sleep of the dead.
Somehow, amidst all this noise, I found time to think about why I haven’t been writing.
For the last year, I’ve felt creatively atrophied, as though that part of my brain had somehow wandered off without the rest of me. The harder I thought about it, the more disjunctured I felt. Expression slipped through my fingers like Tantalus’s grapes, forever inching beyond my reach. I truly wanted to give up, to stop my brain hurting if nothing else.
It’s easy to forget that writing is hard, especially when you’ve had a really positive, empowering streak that suddenly evaporates and you don’t know why. The time and energy spent searching for the why can be even more dispiriting. Vice-like imposter syndrome sent me spiraling into self-doubt, self-blame and even greater inarticulacy. For a writer, feeling like you’re losing your voice is very frightening. Not Writing is hard because your emotions and thoughts build with no outlet, so you can feel suffocated in your own mind. Of course, this only makes the expressive inertia worse, and being locked inside a situation somewhat obviously precludes the necessary perspective to untangle it.
Being a writer is fraught with expectation. I think, perhaps, I hadn’t really understood the impact of this. People project them onto you, sometimes without even realising they are doing so. And my internal expectations were eating me up too. The fear that I’d write something that wasn’t relatable, that said something stupid, that misused language or was simply dull overtook my mind. Pieces I wrote were binned or shelved. My experiences felt trite and easy to critique, my viewpoints selfish and boring, and my words cliched and facile. I struggle to people-please with my work, yet couldn’t escape the idea that I should be, so the simplest thing was to do nothing. I believed, not necessarily incorrectly, that someone else would always write something better than me – cleverer, more relevant, more eloquent, so why bother? A whirlpool of negativity enhanced by my status as Beer Writer of the Year and the expectation I felt came with that accolade which I knew I wasn’t fulfilling.
While I understood that full-time adulting as my father’s carer was impacting my creativity, taking up so much space in my brain, it felt impossible to work around. The worry and the pressure seemed to be expanding balloon-like, forcing all other thoughts to the side. I felt cut off and alienated from myself and anything else I was experiencing, yet embarrassed to wallow in something so everyday. The physical and psychological strains of perimenopause elicited similar feelings. I became convinced everyone else knew exactly what they were doing and my disorientation was of my own making, a consequence of my basic failures as a human being. Writing began to feel pointless.
Negative feedback sealed the deal. Streams of rejections and unanswered emails seemed less like a contraction of the industry and more like a deserved punishment. Aggressive editorial commentary reduced me to tears, cementing in my brain that my words simply were not good enough, sticking them in my throat until I choked on them. I started to look for a new job.
Arriving back in London was, albeit unintentionally, a good time to be Not Writing. Our relentless schedule acted as a sterling preventative, offering respite from staring at a blank page, both literally and figuratively. Talking to people most every day, most of the time, helped break the stranglehold of silence in my brain that comes from a very solitary occupation. Conversations made me feel more grounded and relatable, and brought me back into the world. Old friends and places opened up memories and understandings that reminded me who I am and why I do this. I began to see my capabilities as stymied rather than vanished and reflected hard on how the different stages of my life have led me here, and that I’m not quite as much of an enormous disappointment to my younger self as I’ve been believing. Quality time spent with my father gently eased emotional intensity of caregiving, and hanging out with my lovely in-laws reconnected me to a wider emotional ecosystem. Dipping my toe in the water of my old life usually stings, but this time it healed.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be the prolific high-achieving writer I have been, but right now trying seems like enough, including trying to be better at failing, and trying to lean into the world outside my head.
13th November 2025
Cultural Cuckoo 