Cure For Writer's Block? Major Illness!

I've been sick for the last seven weeks, I've had two surgeries, and I've often found myself huddled in a black corner of my mind crying tears into a brown wooden bucket. It has sucked. But during that time something interesting happened: I found a cure for my writer's block.

Now I wouldn't recommend this cure for everyone. Because who wants to be sliced open multiple times, not be able to eat, not be able to move, and otherwise not be able to live any semblance of a normal life? But I think there are some lessons to be learned from the experience.

When you're going through a major illness and, as I so eloquently stated last week, you feel like you've "been hacked apart with an axe and stapled back together," you start to have some interesting conversations with yourself. They go something like this:

• "What if I don't get better?"
• "What if I don't live as long as I thought I would? What if I don't get as far as I thought I'd get?"
• "How could I be going along just fine and suddenly find myself bedridden and unable to live my life?"
• "Why am I so chicken shit about my writing? Or about anything, for that matter?"
• "I need to stop wasting time. I have wasted too much time."
• "Am I living the life I want to live? I'm close, but is close good enough?"

This is sort of what happened to me. It finally sunk in that I'm not in control of my existence on planet earth - I could be yanked out of it whenever the puppeteer decides my act is over. But what I can control is my performance while I'm here. What I can control is how much I let fear dictate my actions. And what I can control is what I decide to do with my time.

I wrote a lot in my twenties about how I felt like I had "stuff" (books, writing, whatever) inside of me, but that everything was stuck behind a three foot thick cement wall. I'd felt some cracks over the last 10 years - I mean I did finally finish a draft of a book - but nothing had truly shifted. I still didn't see myself able to formulate anything fictional that was worth reading.

But when I got so sick, that big cement wall fell through the floor. For the first time in my life I got out of my own way. Because it turns out, the cement wall is me. My mind. My fears. And I was just too tired and beaten down to be able to think or fear or...get in my own way.

In the middle of the night one night, about three weeks after my first surgery, I came up with a new character. I typed out the opening prose in the Notepad app on my iPhone, in the pitch black of my bedroom at 3:30 in the morning. When I read it the next day I was pretty happy with it. And excited. Because she felt real. She was interesting. She was going to have a story to tell, although I still don't know what that story is yet. But I can't wait to try to tell it.

As I continue to try to heal and get back to normal, I'm thankful for my new perspective on life. I don't want to spend energy criticizing myself, fearing things that may or may not happen, and stifling my writing ability. I know now that I don't have time to waste. And yes, we are all aware of this most of the time. But we really don't take it seriously until something serious happens. You know?