It's ok not to write through it
I don’t know who needs to hear this right now, but if thinking about the state of the world leaves you with an impending sense of doom and nauseating dread: you don’t need to write through it.
If your rage and determination are inspiring you, then by all means, write. (I would never tell anyone NOT to write.) But don’t feel like you have to. It’s ok to feel bad and take care of yourself.
This is a reminder for myself as much as it is for anyone else. I’ve done the Writing Through It thing before, back when Trump was first elected in 2016. It was actually a great experience, but it took a lot out of me.
I’d spent the past year researching classical reception in the the alt-right while writing Not All Dead White Men, but still, his victory was a horrifying shock to me. Less than a week later, I got on a plane to give a talk on my book material. The first draft of my lecture had almost a page devoted to justifying the importance of my research, because I assumed I’d be dealing with a slightly skeptical snooty Ivy league classics audience who needed some convincing about why we should be paying attention to white supremacist internet trolls. Instead, I faced a room of people who looked as frightened and numb as I felt. I almost cried during the Q&A when someone asked me what we could do to combat online extremism. Didn’t they know that, if I’d known the answer to that, I’d be doing that and not standing in front of them talking about Ovid and pickup artists?
Three days later, I gave that talk a second time. I felt a little less frozen, and when someone asked me again what classicists could do, I actually had a few ideas. And I’d realized that my book manuscript, the first draft of which I had sent to my editor literally two days before the election, was going to need a massive overhaul if the book was going to speak to readers in our new normal. So, on Friday afternoon, I told my Eidolon team I was thinking about writing something. After two and a half feverish days of writing, editing, more editing, figuring out custom art, brainstorming titles, and crying, on Monday morning we hit “publish” on “How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor.”
It’s still the most-read article we ever published, and even though at the time some of my colleagues told me I was being hysterical and alarmist, I think it holds up pretty fucking well. There was more “saving Western civilization” talk during those four Trump years than I ever could have imagined. And with J.D. Vance as his 2024 V.P. pick… you know what? I’m not going to think about that right now.
Since then, whenever something bad has happened, I’ve waited to see if I’ll feel that same impulse that drove me in November 2016. Instead, my experience has been much more like this classic Reductress headline:
But that’s ok. It is always ok to just feel your feelings and not force them into articulate sentences. Go take your dog for a walk. Drink some water. Build some Lego flowers or hug a stuffed animal.
Above all, connect with your community. Looking back on my “How to Be a Good Classicist” experience, the best part by far was working so closely with my incredible Eidolon team, who poured so much energy and heart into that piece that they really should have been credited as co-writers rather than editors. Your community will be what saves you and keeps you in the fight.
Take care of yourself, friends.
I had been taking the summer “off” from writing, not intentionally, but it happened. Now I know I need to write—in a personal journal way—to take care of myself through this. I wrote a daily anxiety dump daily for two years over the pandemic. I shudder to think what it would have been like without it. So here’s me trying to show up for private writing, maybe it will inspire public writing, maybe not, that’s not the point.
Yes, I'm writing less but thinking about sanity. Our society conditions us to turn outwards. Look for fulfillment and change out there, even sanity. No. I can be the sanity I need.