Well, I’m going to be very honest with you guys. Lately, I haven’t felt like writing. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s that there’s this hollow feeling in my chest that makes it hard to begin. Every time I try to force myself, something in me resists. Like I shouldn’t be doing this. Like writing isn’t productive, isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing anymore even though it’s always been my outlet, my escape, the one place I could make sense of things. And I keep asking myself, what’s the point? It’s not like many people will read this. It’s not like I’m getting paid for it. I still have a day job. I still have responsibilities, things that feel more urgent, more “real”. Writing, these days, feels more indulgent. Like I’m committing some quiet offense against productivity. But I defiantly did it anyway. Not because I suddenly found motivation, or believed in what I was writing. But because it was the only way I knew how to move through the fog. And I think that’s what this comes down to. If writing is truly something you care about—something you keep coming back to, even when it feels pointless—then you don’t get to stop. Don’t stop writing. That was one of the first things my high school English teacher drilled into me. Not “write well”. Not “write beautifully”. Just—don’t stop. Even when it sounds ridiculous, even when your thoughts feel like static, even when every sentence you touch collapses under its own weight. Write it down. There will be days when your brain will refuse to cooperate, just like mine had been, for these past few weeks. I’d sit there like a fool, staring at a half-formed paragraph, trying to force coherence out of something that clearly didn’t want to be understood. The sentences wouldn’t land. The structure would fall apart. The piece then ended up drifting so far from my original idea that I didn’t even recognize what I was trying to say anymore. So I did what most people do, I stopped. I closed the document, tossed it into the graveyard of my Drafts folder and let it sit there while I convinced myself that I just needed a break. But stopping doesn’t actually stop anything. My brain kept going. Loud, relentless, irritating. Fragments kept showing up. Half-ideas. Sentences that didn’t belong anywhere. It felt like noise, and I hated it, especially when I couldn’t really do something about it. There’s something uniquely frustrating about knowing your mind is producing something, but not knowing what to do with it. So I did the only thing I could. I wrote it down anyway.
Messy, disjointed, almost embarrassing. The kind of writing you’d never show anyone. I wasn’t trying to make it good, either. I was just trying to get it out of my head and onto something tangible. Sure, it didn’t really make the noise in my head disappear. But when I came back to it later, hours later, I saw it differently. It wasn’t noise, it was raw material that I could use. Bits and pieces of something unfinished, not particularly useless. Some sentences here had a pulse. An idea there also meant something. It wasn’t a complete piece, but it was definitely movement. That’s the part no one really tells you about writing. You don’t get clarity by waiting for the mess to sort itself. You get there by laying it all out right in front of you. Most people stop because they think it’s better to wait it out than write through it. Not because they can’t write, but because writing with a scattered mind feels wrong, like it will never match the polished version they had imagined. So they pause. They wait for clarity, for the silence, for the “right” moment that could sometime take days to come. But it doesn’t work like that. Sometimes your mind is still loud, still unfocused and instead of forcing the piece, you open another page and pour the noise there. You don’t try to fix it. You just write it, close it and leave it alone. Then hours later, when you come back to it, something will shift. What once felt like chaos will start to take shape, and in between these fragments, you will find something new. Whether it be a direction, an idea or a piece that’s worth writing. If you stop every time it gets uncomfortable, you’ll never move past the part that’s meant to be uncomfortable. So don’t stop. Not when it’s messy, not when it’s unclear, not when it feels like everything you’re writing is unusable. Because somewhere in that mess, buried between the frustration and all these fragments, is the version of the piece that actually works. It’s there, taking shape in ways you can’t see yet. And you won’t be able to reach it unless you simply keep going. Sincerely, Cherie. The Whiffler is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell The Whiffler that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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