I know when I lost my urge to write. Or at least to write positively. It was shortly after Donald Trump was elected President. All my efforts to blog came out angry or flat or angry and flat at the same time. I tried to write, but within a year, my desire to write had completely waned. As a result, my blog has lain fallow since November 2018. Even when I had positive stories to share.

An opinion piece by Tish Harrison Warren in the New York Times offered useful perspective.

Warren had suffered several personal losses – her father’s death, a miscarriage, another difficult pregnancy, and another miscarriage – and then found she couldn’t read either.

She couldn’t concentrate on what she read. She couldn’t remember what she’d read. Everything she read felt meaningless. Her inability to read caused her to question her ability to write, since the two are tied so closely. Her experience with reading mirrored the way I felt about writing.

In conversations with friends and her therapist, Warren learned that her experience was not unusual. After a death. After failed relationships. After difficult surgery. In times of intense grief or stress, our brains expend energy elsewhere. Then, reading or writing may just be too much.

How can reading just be too hard for a book lover?

As I look back on my life, I observe that my writing follows my mood. I always wrote productively for clients. I didn’t have any choice. But writing my own feelings depended completely on how well things were going in my life. The past few years have given me plenty to feel anxious or depressed about. Racial injustice. Covid pandemic. The insurrection.

Many people write their way out of the tough times. I write less. But, I’ve never been through a drought like the last several years, and I have missed writing. However, I couldn’t get up the energy or the ideas.

It gave Warren hope to know she wasn’t alone. Her return to reading took time, but she came through.

It helped Warren, and it helps me, to gain perspective. To recognize this too shall pass. Of late, I’ve felt myself calming down and opening up. Travel is always a thought starter for me, and a trip this past month really helped. Over the past weeks, I’ve thought – twice! – about something I’d like to blog on.

So, I’m tentatively stepping back into the writing world. Stay tuned!

Have you lost the love of writing or reading? What helped you?

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