Can Running Help Me Fall Back In Love With Writing?

‘If running creates a void, then writing fills it.’

Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash

I can’t seem to write recently. Other than my newsletter and a few bits of journalism here and there — which can hardly be called ‘creative writing’ and falls more under the bracket of ‘technical writing’ or ‘reporting’ — I haven’t written anything in months.

To say that it freaks me out would be an understatement.

I was always the one to support Seth Godin who said things like: “There’s no writer’s block just as there’s no talker’s block. You show up and write.” But then, I feel so agitated on some days, I don’t even want to talk. So perhaps there is writer’s block as much as talker’s block. Sorry about that, Seth.

Still, what I used to think of as “writer’s block” wasn’t a block at all — it was laziness, which is fairly easy to fight with willpower (and which I did). This time, however, it feels less like that and more like complete and utter paralysis. I have no trouble sitting in front of a computer and opening a blank page. I have no trouble writing a sentence or two. I am not terrified of the blank page, as many writers claim to be when they have a block. I don’t see the point in writing. There isn’t anything I want to say. Or maybe there is, deep underneath the rocks of my subconscious — a water well I could mine for and find its source — but it’s too much trouble, and I’d rather not. Here, I said it.

And it bums me out. Because if I don’t have writing, then I pretty much have nothing. (Of course, I have family, friends, a job, and my readers, but that’s different.) Writing has always been this anchor to hold me in bad and good times. In a way, you could say I was married to it. (“In sickness and in health.”) But now we’re avoiding each other, and there’s this passive-aggressive cloud above us. We are like a middle-aged couple that should have pulled the pin on the relationship a while back but is still holding on, primarily out of inertia and habit.

So, like the stereotypical man in the most classic situation, I did the obvious thing: I started an affair with an old flame. Which, for me, has always been running.

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