Sometimes it’s Hard to Write: My On-Again, Off-Again Relationship with Writing
I rarely get writer’s block. All I usually need to write is an idea, a comfortable seat and a computer. But sometimes writing can be difficult, and I’ll take hiatuses from it for months at a time. Every now and then, during these absences, someone close to me will ask me, “Have you written anything lately?”
Even when the answer to that question is “no”, I still always have something that I’m at least interested in writing about. Truth is, sometimes, I don’t have the mental energy for actually writing and publishing something, and that lack of mental energy can be for a plethora of reasons. But one thing I’ve realized lately, is that my relationship with writing is largely influenced by my past as a writer.
I when I was a sophomore in college, I began working as a guest contributor and staff writer for my campus newspaper, The Edinboro Spectator. I wrote mostly music and movie reviews, and later campus news. A couple years later, I got a job as the editor for the Op-Ed section of the paper where I’d write editorials and commentaries on student concerns and social issues.
This was probably one of the most fulfilling periods of my writing career because for the first time, I was writing publicly about things that meant something to me, I had a relatively large audience of people reading my work and I was getting paid for it.
Most importantly, I was 20 year-old Black man writing commentaries about race, sexism, religion and other topics at a predominantly white university in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Basically, you couldn’t tell me anything.
One of my fondest memories of this time was walking into my sociology class [late] and my professor, for whom I had a ton of respect, publicly commended me for something that I wrote. As I walked in, he said, “Ah Mr. DeBose, great job on your piece in the Spectator” and the class applauded me.
Around the same time, I’d have people who I barely knew tell me that their professor had them read one of my articles in their class. All of this made me extremely proud.
I don’t say all of that to be unnecessarily nostalgic or self-aggrandizing. I mention that to say having such a positive experience as a writer at a fairly young age built my expectations for my future writing career.
Eventually, as we all do, I learned the differences between expectations and reality and realized that the real world can be very different from what I experienced in college. Writing positions are hard to come by, many talented young writers are poorly compensated for their work. Many get paid in exposure and experience. Oddly enough, exposure and experience don’t pay the rent.
Fast forward to the present, I work in higher education while still blogging and I’m realizing that it can be hard to consistently write. Writing is an act of labor that is mental and, at times, emotional. Those forms of labor can be difficult to manage when you’re focused on your job, paying the bills, your family, your relationships and your health.
It can also be hard to write when much of your work consists of discussing social issues that deal with pain, especially while you’re living these social issues and healing some of your own pain.
It can be hard to write when much of what you believe challenges nearly everything you’ve been taught to believe about this country.
It can be hard to write when you’re not sure if people even care about what you write.
It can be hard to write and not come off as perpetually angry or negative when so much about the world around you causes those feelings.
It can be hard to write in a world that sends messages that you’re not smart enough, not hard working enough, not wealthy enough, or simply just not enough.
But, what keeps me going is that as a Black writer, I am often reminded that I’m a part of long tradition of writers and people whose job it is to tell the truth. And that truth doesn’t always have to come in the form of pain, anger, or trauma. That truth can be humor, it can be curiosity, and it can be happiness.
This reminder of the tradition that I belong to usually comes from the work of the people whose work I admire, I have to thank the scholars, writers, journalists and educators whose work keeps me inspired:
Kiese Laymon, Kevin Powell, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, Tef Poe, Mychel Denzel Smith, Rosa Clemente, Toure, Nelson George, Myles E. Johnson, Eve Ewing, Jamilah Lemieux, Isabel Wilkerson, Ibram X. Kendi, Shaun Harper, dream hampton, Roxanne Gay, Morgan Jerkins, Damon Young, Panama Jackson, Marc Lamont Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Writing can be hard, it can be exhausting, but it’s necessary. My hope is that someday, I can use my work to inspire someone as well.
