Learning to Forgive Ourselves During Tough Times
Sometimes we can’t stay on track with the words—and that’s okay
First off: I head out on my UK tour next week! Get your tickets here! (And note: a ticket includes admission to the talk, the opportunity to meet me, and a signed, personalized copy of the book!)
Next up: this question came to me on my
Substack, but I thought it would be best answered here—where I imagine many of your have been faced with disruptive times in life but found it difficult to keep writing.Here’s what Christina asked:
Hi Sooz! I am getting ready to start IVF and am worried I will be to exhausted or crazy hormonal to write even though it bring me joy. I would love to know any tips you have on staying on track with writing while going through the highs and lows of IVF?
Ah, Christina. I feel so many emotions on your behalf! IVF is tough. So tough, and few people can understand that—but I absolutely do.
Look, here’s the reality: you might not stay on track with your writing, but I desperately want for you to be okay with that. You will be going through enough stress without the added guilt and pressure of trying to stay productive.
I understand your desire to not disrupt your writing. Oh boy do I! I was under deadlines when I began IVF in 2018, and I was terrified of getting behind.
Lo and behold, I did get behind. Not just during IVF, but during my near-death delivery. Then when my daughter Cricket nearly died almost exactly a year ago, completely transforming our lives to one of chronic illness management.
Life happens, and sometimes it gets in the way of our creative work. We have to make peace with that.
I mean, I guess we don’t have to make peace with it, but as I said above, why add blame and guilt onto an already stressful time?
Oh wait: I know I why. Because that’s what we’ve been trained to do thanks to a society that prizes output over sustainability.1
With IVF, you are going to be pumped full of hormones that might very well impact your ability to create. I can’t say for sure because your creativity isn’t like mine.
Then there is the long, sustained trauma of the embryo transfers, injections, and frequent office visits. I don’t mean to frighten you, but the reality is that it’s an emotionally demanding ride—and physically demanding too.2 There is, of course, a huge possible reward at the end that makes it’s worth it. But again, I don’t know how your creative mind will respond to the challenges.
Some of us are better at switching off the anxiety and/or grief and/or excitement and/or physical distress and “just working.” But many of us don’t excel at that—and then we feel shame over that fact. We’ve been taught we should exist in vacuums and that our emotions or pain should not interfere with our work. It is a sign of weakness and failure if you can’t “just get it done.”
But that’s not true. Of course it’s not true. And especially not when the job is creative one, deeply connected to our emotions and sense of identity.
Our bodies and brains are systems; everything is connected—even the words on the page.
Sometimes, the challenges of the outside world do motivate a person to work more. Or perhaps to seek escape in the creative world.
Other times, the outside world has simply taken too much from a person, and there isn’t anything left to channel outward.
Neither way is wrong, and few people are one way or the other. We tend to slide back and forth along the spectrum
Here, let me share what my own creative journey looked like during IVF so you can see my own slider in action.
When I was really hyped on estrogen for egg retrieval, I wrote almost an entire book in a month. I felt so motivated, and ahhh, I just wanted to write romance!
What came out was The Executioners Three, and not the next Witchlands book. But I needed an emotional outlet with no pressure, and that’s what TE3 was for me.
I had so much fun with that book, I shared it on Wattpad!
But then I had a miscarriage before I finished drafting TE3…and I did not write for a long while.
The book is still up on Wattpad, 80,000 words long but without an ending and over a 100,000 readers that never got to see where Freddie and the gang ended up.3
When I was in the “wait and pray” stage after an embryo transfer, all I would do was the bare minimum daily administrative part of my job and then binge the shit out of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Or Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Or Frostpunk. (I had three rounds of IVF, and those were the games I binged each time.)
Like you, Christina, I really wanted to be productive. And meet my deadlines. And not be impacted by the hormones in my body or the desperate, terrified hope I felt every day.
But the reality was that I didn’t feel creative for many weeks at a time. And once I did get pregnant (and it didn’t end in miscarriage), I had an absolutely brutal pregnancy. I tried to work every day—Witchshadow was already late by then4—but it was not my finest work. I existed in a brain fog with constant nausea. I ended up rewriting so much of that book.
And then, I nearly died during delivery, and the recovery from that was long, slow, demanding, and complicated by the fact that I had a newborn during a newly locked-down Covid world.
I gave myself shingles trying finish a book and manage an new baby.
I don’t recommend it. No book is worth it. Truly.
Let’s be honest for a second, though. Our desire to keep writing during tough times is not really about the output, is it? It’s about the external deadlines, the need to feed our families or the pressure to perform for people depending on you…
And also, it’s about the way we view ourselves.
Many of us are take pride in meeting the tasks given to us. Having to accept that life can interfere with that sometimes—we’re not good at it. I am not.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “NEVER AGAIN! I will never put myself through that stress again just to get a book finished!” And then…I do it again. And again. And again. Did I really learn from the shingles incident? Nope, not really.
Or rather, my neural pathways that are so accustomed to meeting the expectations of others that they have not learned from the incident.
But what I have found instead is that I’ve learned to recognize when those neural pathways light up. When the voice starts shouting, Get it done, no matter the cost to you and your physical or mental health!, I step away and say, But why?
I don’t do this right away, of course. Sometimes I’ll be many weeks in to beating myself up because life got in the way again—and I’ll have been pushing myself to accommodate those external demands by pulling all-nighters or working through weekends and ignoring my family.
But eventually, I do realize what’s going on. I do recognize that the voice shouting at me to BE MORE PRODUCTIVE! isn’t my voice or rooted in any scientific reality.
Again, we are complex systems, not individual pieces of emotions or creativity or drafting output that all operate independently of each other. So to ignore the connectedness of it all is to simply not exist in reality.
Basically, Christina, I don’t have any tips to give you other than to embrace self-compassion and to learn to recognize when the voice demanding output is rooted in reality and when it’s not.
Your ability to work through hard times will be different than mine. Neither of us is a morally better or worse human because of that. We’re just different, and I want ALL OF US to be able to work toward accepting that in ourselves.
I also want us all to work toward accepting our fellow writers who might need more (or less) time or more (or less) stability than we do to create. Your brain ain’t mine, nor are your circumstances, and we’re all just doing the best we can with what we have.
Alright Christina, thank you for your question. I am rooting for you through the IVF cycle(s) and beyond, and feel free to reach out again—either on the Substacks or by email—if you have more questions or want more insights about the IVF process.
Or you may hate everything I’ve said here and never want to hear from me again. Totally fair too. 😂
All the best to you and yours.
💚 - Sooz
I highly recommend the book Hustle and Float by Rahaf Harfoush!
And financially demanding to a degree that prevents most people from having access. The Frenchman could not have afforded to do it if Truthwitch hadn’t surprised everyone by performing well.
Although, they can find out next year! The Executioners Three is releasing in August 2025 in the US and UK! That said, it still doesn’t have an ending. Ha. I will get to that once Witchlight is finished!
To be fair: this book was also a challenge because I had to combine two books into one for Publishing Reasons, and that was a far more complicated process than simply writing two books and smashing them together.
I needed this today. Thank you for sharing. 💗
This resonates deeply. I've been querying through covid, cancer, infertility, and leading a union to the cusp of strike. The book I've been working on for the last 10 months is a book that I desperately want to have written because it's really good, unique, and marketable—but I'm not enjoying a speck of the writing. While taking writing 'vacations' from it I've drafted another book and a half! The pressure I've put on myself to produce THE THING I MUST PRODUCE sucks, and it makes me question whether trad pub is right for me at all.
That and the fact that many agents take longer to read a business letter than I do to write a book.
One pressure you didn't mention is the dread that with any life change the writing will stop and not come back. My fear of mortality from my cancer diagnosis (which was a doozy) manifested in the fear that I'd never write another book. That fear continues to push me toward productivity, but I have to recognize when I'm being motivated by existential dread and take a step back, or else writing becomes a miserable slog.