i'm stuck and i don't know how to get out!
movement, even if it doesn't seem to lead anywhere, is a virtue.
dear jojo,
i'm a twenty-five year old who just feels stuck right now. my therapist says it's okay but it doesn't feel like it. i’m stuck with my writing (only having one thing published & not knowing what to write anymore), i'm stuck trying to get a relationship (the people I like move farther away from me & dating seems bleak), i'm stuck with the bridges i've burned. did i mention that i was stuck? i'm just not sure how to proceed anymore and was looking for some perspective. things are good career wise, and i have a solid friend group, but outside of all that i feel like i can't move. thanks in advance for any advice.
sincerely,
the limbo king
dear limbo king,
i wish i was answering this at a time when i was not also in limbo, but here we are, both stuck in minute hells of our own making, and since i’m not sure i’ll emerge from this one anytime soon it’s probably time to just start doing the goddamn things i don’t feel like doing. if at any point this letter starts to feel more like i’m talking to myself than you, don’t worry too much, it’s (mostly) on purpose.
congratulations on getting your last piece published! i’m here to remind you that that’s an extremely significant event in your life, and you should be proud of yourself, even if it’s been a minute or it’s faded back into everyday life background grey. i’m also here to remind you that the path to publishing and having any mental stability around publishing is a long one.
every time i win an award or get acknowledged or basically receive any sort of confirmation that my lonely pursuit of language on this watery blue planet hasn’t been entirely in vain, i cry tears of relief and then about one to two hours later i start sobbing because of how horrible i feel. the problem with publishing and working in the arts, especially when your pay or acknowledgement or “yes”es are low or inconsistent, is that it never feels like enough. i feel a brief, bright flash of hope, and the whoosh of a thousand pounds of weight being lifted off my shoulders as the eternally kind voice of relief tells me it’s going to be okay, and then after i’ve cried out all the fear i’ve carried daily since the last noteworthy event happened in my career, i fall right back into freaking out.
is this healthy? probably not.
is it common? i think so.
i’ve always struggled immensely with getting good news related to my career, mostly because, no matter what i’ve gotten, i’ve never managed to surpass the goalpost in my mind of when i can stop worrying and really believe this thing is going to work out. i don’t want to obsess over awards and accolades, and i also want specific things from my career. i want to be published, and to make money doing this, and for my work to have a bigger life than just sitting around gathering dust on my desk, but most of all i want confirmation that i am not 100% wrong or delusional or a straight up threat to agreed upon reality by believing that i have what it takes to make it in this field. and so usually when i hear something good, i have about a half hour of relief before all the fears come back twice as strong and double as loud. which, of course, fucks with my ability to then sit down and write anything else.
not knowing what to write is one of the most consistent features of being a writer. it’s so common, in fact, that we have our whole own term for it, one that other artists don’t have. painter’s block? guitarist’s block? sculptor’s block? (that would be a slab of marble, i think.)
the point being, if you don’t know what to write or where this thing is going anymore, you’re at least in pretty good historical company.
if you want to write - really want to write, like build a life around it write - you will eventually find a way to write again. but it can feel horrendous and impossible and like you’re locked in a battle to the death with the universe, which nobody enjoys much, no matter how tough they look. it also does nothing to serve you and your growth as a human or a writer (or your mental health in general) to be both not writing and feeling stuck and actively thinking about how bad it feels to be stuck and not writing. if anything, this internal chicken-and-egg hamster wheel just serves to burrow you deeper and deeper into the hole.
many people will tell you to just sit down and write, and that if you aren’t capable of doing that then you don’t really want it enough. or they’ll say it’s a problem of self will, or you’re just making excuses, or you need to learn how to write all the time regardless of how you feel or you’ll never make it. but i’m not those people, and i don’t believe any of that.
i don’t believe in forcing things - projects, art experiments, relationships - to the point of sacrificing my own health or wellbeing. i don’t write every day, because it tends to drive me kind of (read: extremely) insane to be intimately in contact with my worst inner critics and doomsayers on a daily basis. and i don’t beat myself up for not writing every day, because i need to be kinder to myself and i refuse to do the world’s dirty work of making me doubt myself and my productivity and worth by playing into systems and structures that are deliberately designed to make sure i never feel like i’m good enough.
i also believe that ninety percent of all writing happens in our heads instead of in our notebooks. i’ve had pieces and poems that i knew i wanted to write about for years, ones i’ve tried to say something in the direction of and fallen flat on my face again & again & again, to the point where i just filed it away and said maybe one day, and then one day came around without any pomp or circumstance and i sat down and wrote it all in one go. and it turned out to be one of the best things i’ve ever written.
when i sat down to write these pieces that turned out to just need more time in the oven, i had no idea that it was indeed the ‘one day’ i had told myself i’d be ready on eventually. these stories had been kicking around in my head for years, and i think there was very little control on the part of my conscious outward self as far as when they decided they were going to come out. but that’s why it’s so important to sit down and at least try pretty often, or to keep on writing other less intellectually intense projects. this is not to say you should never write anything that challenges you, or that you should spend your free time writing fluff in the hopes that one day your intellectually rigorous magnum opus knocks on your door and announces it’s ready to come out. you should write to challenge yourself. you should spend your free time writing things that cultivate at least one quality you would like to see more of in your own work.
all this means is that different projects will have different timelines, and that your job is just to stick around long enough to see them come to fruition.
i try not to underestimate the power of the subconscious, both because i know the potency of the nasty little critics i essentially just hand a microphone and sound system to whenever i decide to embark on a near impossible journey (aka writing every single day for x amount of pages and x amount of days no matter what); and because of the way my brain is always piecing things together and making sense of the world even when i’m not intentionally directing it. but when you’re stuck, and you know you’re stuck, and you don’t want to be stuck, it’s fucking miserable. and the clock is ticking, and you will never be this young again, and you are supposed to be living and laughing and loving and making the most of this moment. and all day long everyone around you who is not a capital-A Real Writer does things like make a cup of coffee and eat toast for breakfast and engage in small talk with their coworkers, and meanwhile you are spending your time staring at a grain of sand trying to find infinity in it while an empty word document blinks before you.
but no pressure.
here is what i can try to offer you:
follow your curiosity.
maybe that sounds extremely obvious to you; maybe you’ve been doing it your whole life, i don’t know. but if you don’t know what to write, you need to figure out what’s even interesting to you right now. so much of the problem of being stuck is that nothing feels compelling or interesting or worth taking a deeper look into. maybe this is an extremely obvious sentiment; but i write it to emphasize that it is your feelings around the world that is making it seem dull, not because the world has become any less interesting. it all feels the same, all feels too trite or pointless or else cavernous and vague and watery and too big too strange too unfamiliar to even dream of finding footing in. (this can also be a symptom that you are experiencing depression, so please keep that in mind as you try to navigate out of this particular sticky spot.)
but you can’t won’t don’t unstick yourself until you find something that gets the ball rolling again.
this is all that’s ever really worked for me, and it applies to both writing and the rest of your life as well, in terms of trying to get things going again.
maybe you have nothing you’re interested in researching and nothing you want to write about; okay. but the beautiful thing about being a writer (and the most dangerous as well) is that you can do pretty much anything and justify it as research or gathering writing material. this is not a hall pass to go fuck up your life and get addicted to heroin like i did, but luckily there’s a whole world of lived experience between smoking percocet off of tin foil in a dorm bathroom and staring at the wall stuck all day (and i trust you to find the healthy middle).
because the thing is that is your real job here.
you have to find something which interests because that is your job on this earth. you became a writer because you saw things around you and you felt things were too real or too beautiful or too scary or too fucked up to just stay silent, and so you had to say something; and this compulsion is just as true now as it was when you were six years old. and if honoring that compulsion to say things means you need to go in search of new things, so be it. go to a different town or neighborhood this week and putz around with your hands in your pocket. go on a treasure hunt to a used bookstore and make it your mission to find as many moth eaten faded historical photo books as you possibly can. look up a word that intrigues you, or a phrase, or a concept, and then try to learn a fun fact or try to take it even further into something else.
here’s my list of things i’ve written down this last week that piqued my interest, whether from reading about them somewhere or from a random thought popping into my head, including but not limited to: what is the longest party on record? what was the largest fire in history? what if i got a tray somewhere to soak all my plants in when i’m giving them their big water for the week? what if i started writing yelp poetry? what if i named it something cute, like haiku reviews? (seriously, what if i did?)
look up alchemical art. look up what, linguistically, en vs in means in indigenous x endogenous. look up what root language genous is coming from. think of a way to use the word constellation the way you saw it used in that one piece and really liked. think of a way to turn your whiny old journal entries into something that you would feel proud to read to a room full of other people. read about maria pearson. read about temple grandin. read about the triangle shirtwaist factory. read about your favorite poets childhoods. read about weird cults that popped up in the eighties or weird cults that have popped up now, and see what questions that leads you to.
that’s all your job has to be right now, king limbo. you just have to start asking questions again.
and maybe you can’t pull off the follow-through right now. maybe you just start writing vaguely intriguing thoughts and feelings down, in the hope that when you do feel stuck again you can look them up and give yourself a reprieve from the deafening deadness of your under-stimulated brain, as thick and dull as set concrete. maybe one of these little one-off questions will lead you to your next poem, or full length book. maybe it will lead you to the library, or a local yoga studio, or the archives of some old and dusty place that is just waiting for you to come inside and uncover all its nearly forgotten wonders. maybe you will find something that stumps you, and you will have to seek out someone who knows more than you on the subject, because you are writing this thing into your next novel and you need it to be accurate so you do not go to print in a mortifying display of ignorance; maybe you will seek out this expert, and it will turn out they are in town this weekend for a conference, and then you will meet and get coffee and suddenly you will fall in love, or else embark on a cross-continental bond-like adventure to uncover the truth of something.
or maybe they won’t.
but maybe, just maybe, they’ll give you five minutes of interest in an otherwise very bored and uninteresting time. and at the end of the day, if nothing else, that’s still better than another identical bored five minutes.
i wish you more than luck.
and for god’s sake, if you’re still stuck, start doing your morning pages.
sincerely, and in mutually ending stuckness,
♡︎ jojo ♡︎
p.s. i’ve gone ahead and compiled a list of prompts and exercises which may or may not be useful at this time
the dictionary project - curation, instruction, and more
on being with krista tippett: choosing curiosity over fear with elizabeth gilbert
on being with krista tippett: the power of words to save us with marie howe
and some journaling questions, designed to help you get to the root of things even quicker:
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