When Writing Fails to be the Healing

*A blog post from April 2024

I started this month, this eve of blooming flowers and mid-spring showers, hoping to write more, filling notebooks with stanzas half-ripened and primed for poetic revelry.

Instead, I read poems and novels and buried myself in work in a way I hadn’t done for some time. In the early mornings, daylight opened to chattering birds and swaying winds, and I listened to morning breaking through the clouds—sunrays stretching like tired limbs renewed from slumber.

I am learning to lean into the quiet, to linger in the minutes of solace between grinding coffee beans and making meaning in movement, seeking measures of poems and prayers in the silence the day begets.

This past month, the days passed with a quick intensity, but not without moments of beauty in between. Although I didn’t write nearly as many poems as I thought I would, April brought me back to some of the most pivotal moments of my journey as a writer. I took a trip with a couple of friends to my alma mater, and walking onto that campus always feels like walking backward into time, not simply for the sake of nostalgia, but because time feels different, almost slower, like hope simmering to an expected end. I spent time catching up with my favorite professor, reading poems, and reminiscing on life and the past eight years since graduating.

One of the ways I find quiet to be the most attainable is through reading or writing. There is something about stilling my body and mind to think—to capture past moments and will them into the present. One would think that as a writer, I must do it often. Surprisingly, in my case, that hasn’t always been true. Most of the time, writing can be quite difficult for me. Maybe it can be attributed to writer’s block or self-doubt, but getting words onto paper often leaves me a little anxious.

It isn’t lost on me that writing is how I make a living, not entirely as an author and a poet, but as a grant writer who finds solace in amplifying the voice of others. Writing about other things—people and places- is easier while maintaining the balance of never unraveling too much of my own story.

Each year, there is this resolve to write more than the years before. I start every January with a lowly declaration, “This is the year I’ll finish the first draft of my novel,” or “This year, I’ll write for 30 minutes a day everyday” in the hopes of edging myself closer to the invisible finish line I set every other 365 days.

And yet, the novel goes unfinished; poems are left unwritten somewhere between waking and dreaming, and time continues to move on.

In so many ways, the exercise of writing is very much what brings me back to myself. Back to school nights, I would sit on the area rug handed down to me by my older sister and write line after line, stanza after stanza, because it was the only way I could maintain the world roiling around within me. Now, so far removed from those moments, I somehow strive to return to that feeling. That resolve that maybe getting it all out, sitting and bleeding as Hemingway would put it, would be what my soul needs.

No, writing may not be the sum of my healing, but putting pen to paper might be the catalyst for a spark to arrive. A fanning to the flame of this thing called existence.

Stay Creative,

Antavia Mason (Pen of the Beloved)

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