Guest Blogger Megan Aronson writes about the seasons and cycles of life and being a writer.
“I’ve been lost and reclusive of late as I deal with the most recent iteration of my grief-growth cycle,” my friend Candace Cahill, author of Goodbye Again, wrote in an online writing group I belong to. “Learning—the hard way, mostly—new things about myself and the challenges still ahead.”
My eyes hovered over her words as her thoughts echoed my own. I wasn’t the only one who’d stopped at the words “grief-growth cycle.” Soon the comments were flooded with replies like, “Grief-growth cycle. I feel that. Never thought of it that way before.”
In two sentences, Candace had fully encapsulated the collective experience of being a writer. Continually turning ourselves inside out on the page and off, we each instantly recognized the “grief-growth cycle” as the intersection of life affecting our writing, and writing affecting our lives. I know this cycle: it courses through periods of personal doubt and professional rejection, retreating underground, nurturing the seeds of ideas for another creative phase, and harvesting acceptances and accolades.
“Where are we at in the cycle right now, each of us?” I wondered as I read my friend’s comments.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the seasons of being a writer and how we cycle through them personally and professionally. I know from experience (and science) that when difficult life circumstances trigger my brain into fight or flight mode, the limbic system switches on its red alert button and my creative center is more difficult to access. I know stress can impact my creativity, and a broken heart can either open the flow for writing, or completely dam it. I’ve also seen how a round of rejections on my writing can paralyze me in life, sending me into a phase of reclusiveness that I must slowly nurse myself out of again. It can wreck my confidence not just as a writer, but as a mom, wife, and friend.
Productivity is often praised over personal growth and satisfaction in our society. We’re pressured to relentlessly produce, hustle, grind, and go. But the writer’s life demands time not just to harvest—we also need periods of renewal, recovery, and growth.
Recently, I’ve found comfort in Julia Cameron’s insightful and lesser-known book “The Sound of Paper.” After a series of challenges triggered another grief-growth cycle, I needed time to tend my personal and professional wounds. Julia gave me permission to embrace my place in the cycle with her powerful words: “I am resting, I am gathering steam,” she wrote. “I am in a low cycle, a time of dormancy, a period in which I will come to know exactly how much and how deeply I love the art I am not at the moment able to practice.”
Last week, I ran into a writing friend and instantly recognized on her face the look of panic I’d also been wearing during my months of “dormancy.”
“I haven’t been able to write,” she said, her eyes ablaze. “I’m caretaking my mom full-time. I can’t get myself to put a thing on the page.”
I told her how I’d just barely escaped this space myself, and how, paradoxically, the only thing that had sped it along was not speeding it along at all. My heart and mind needed time to heal, to wander in the woods, to walk the stacks at the library and grab anything that piqued my interest. As we spoke, I remembered the existential angst I’d felt in her shoes. I wished I could have granted myself the peace of accepting my season of recovery, rather than fighting against it the whole way.
I want to live the kind of artist’s life that flows gracefully through its seasons and honors the needs of my creative nature. When I’m incubating ideas for a new book, I live in curiosity—not producing, but gathering notes, ideas, life experiences, and reflections. An ideas file may be scraps and shards of random, unhinged scribbles, but those scribbles will become the words of an essay or book one day. I need time to be unhinged. I need time to wander and weed the corners of my mind and life. The time to harvest and produce will come again soon.
Moving forward now, I wonder: Can I be brave enough to continually honor where I am in the grief-growth cycle? Can we as writers grant ourselves a week, a day, or even a month (gasp!) to heal from life experiences before we write again? Can we go dormant for a winter and simply germinate our ideas, or celebrate a spring of creating just for ourselves, not for the world’s consumption?
I hope we can. I hope my recent experiences have taught me to let life inform my writing gracefully, with time to heal between the living and the writing, embracing the seasons as they come.
I’m coming out of my winter now, grateful for its lessons. The panic is subsiding as new ideas are beginning to burst forth again. Another spring is coming.
Originally posted as “The Grief-Growth Cycle of Being a Writer,” August 30, 2023, Brevity Blog.
Megan Aronson is a writer and public speaker who lives in the red rocks of Sedona, AZ.
Excerpted from Megan’s website:
I’m a writer, a speaker, an advocate, a mom of four, a #YOLOGirl (You Only Live Once) and a survivor of…just about everything.
In 2011, I wrote a piece called Grim Reaper Girl that went viral, sharing how empathy saved my life after a string of 12 deaths had left me feeling like death followed me everywhere.
Over the next few years, the slew of tragedy continued at a relentless pace. In total, we lost 30 people in 8 years. We moved 4 times. We lost a baby, our home, my daughter’s best friend…and then I discovered my husband’s deadly painkiller addiction had escalated, and we became a miracle in the WE’LL BE COUNTING STARS story.
But my story is not a pity-party-table-for-one-please story. It’s one of triumph in tragedy. Little triumphs that came slowly and carefully while I fought for my life, my joy, and my love.
I’ve written myself through grief upon grief, and brought myself back to life again and again. I am still doing it now, and along the way, I’m sharing my journey, because I have become a self-certified Heal-Thyself Specialist (it’s a fancy title, I know, I earned it with 14 years at The School of Hard Knocks. Did you get a degree from there, too?!).
I’m here to tell you, I see you, I get you, I’ve been through it, too, and here’s how we pick ourselves up and keep moving forward again and again, with our broken, open hearts. I’m here to remind you how to open when you’re closed, to soften when you feel yourself turn hard like callouses.
I’m here to encourage you to dare greatly, even when vulnerability makes you quake in your boots. I’m here to urge you forward into unfolding again and again.
I’m also here to remind myself, and YOU, not to take ourselves or this thing called life too seriously!
Megan’s work has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction’s Tiny Truths. She is currently seeking a publisher for her memoir, We’ll Be Counting Stars, which tells the powerful “love vs. addiction” story she lived with her husband, Kory, a survivor of the opioid crisis.
