On running and writing essays

Lately, I’ve had trouble writing.

I wouldn’t call it writer’s block. It’s more of an I-Don’t-Want-To-Say-Anything-To-Anyone kind of thing. I simply lacked the motivation to spread ideas and stories beyond my cerebral cortex.

I thought about writing fiction, but in the current situation where my country harasses my wife’s country — which I can’t help but be a part of because of my embarrassing passport — writing lies (which is what all fiction is) feels like a cop-out, escapism, a cheap attempt at hiding from reality behind a thin blanket.

Neither can I find enough reasons to read fiction — lies someone else concocted — when the immediate world is rich with events, problems, and things to analyse and understand.

I know this might change, as opinions and attitudes do depending on life situations, but for now, that’s how it is.

So this year, in 2022, besides the novella about the first days of the war in Ukraine and a handful of short stories at a UCLA course I took, I mainly wrote journalism.

But journalism, no matter how lucrative and fun it might seem from the outside, has a way of boring and exhausting your nerves after a certain point. Having published more than seven articles this year in big household names like The Guardian and Al Jazeera and even Russia’s very own Meduza — about the war on Ukraine — I feel depleted. Done. I feel like I want nothing to do with writing about the war ever again. Writing about topics where you…