This Month’s Crisis: to quit or not to quit

I cried yesterday. It was one of those overwhelming moments you get in you 20s, where you feel 1000% unqualified to run your life. Like how am I am meant to find a life partner, face school again, make a money, get my stories out there in the world, manage to text my best friend back, and enjoy it all at once? The angsty üshe.

Snivel, sniff, snivel some more. Nothing you haven’t heard before. I’ll spare you the snivels, if only because I’ve sat down here at my Aunt’s lovely white countertops to remind myself why I can’t quit writing.

This isn’t a half time pep talk: come on, Karis. Buck up. You’ve done this before, you can do it again. ¡Animo! No. I cycled through my pep-talks last week. They didn’t stick.

This is a, Karis, the rocket has indeed left earth’s orbit. We cannot simply U-turn it back to NASA’s welcoming arms. You’re in too deep and have nothing to return to. I love writing too much, need it too much, to quit now.

Let me first define quitting.

The various degrees of quittery:

There is quitting of the third degree, which is the most rash, but also the most tempting.

I peel off my Hello, My Name Is Writer name tag, fold it sticky side together and forget about it in a drawer forever. Just stop and think with me for a moment: what would it be like to not write? To have anywhere from 2-6h of free time a day to pick up a less lonely, maybe less demanding hobby like… rock climbing (a hobby that demands more exercise my living room paces!? Please.) Or concert piano. Or finally learning mandarin.

I could go on a nice date and not have to smile over my drink thinking, I have whole universes in my brain that leak out of my ears. How do you feel about court politics? Dragons? About Google search histories on instant deaths by sword, because I realised beheading this mage allows a few milliseconds where they could unleash the plague that would end the world and such vengeance would exponentially complicate my plot?

I’d have more social bandwidth and finally reconnect with those high school friends I’m terrified of bumping into in the city. Maybe, maybe, maybe I’d even learn to cook! Rather than wiping the ramen broth off my keyboard with my sleeve a my imaginary assassin skewers the plague-danger mage through the cerebellum.(Reddit tells me this is the only assured, instant death by sword. The source of all truth, Reddit is.)

This is quitting of the most drastic degree.

The second degree quitting is less extreme, but more likely: pull out of the commercial running. Write for passion and hobby. I know myself, it would mean I’d never finish a story, but it might be fun. Enjoyable.

The third and less drastic degree is to quit on this particular story. Start a new world—my third this year. Or set it all down for a minute; edit Cinder Bound.

Why I want to quit:

There are the usual culprits. Imposter syndrome. Writing is hard. I have no inspiration. Yadda yadda.

But there are three reasons that haunt me.

When I finished Bleed the Wolves, I went dark for a while. People talk about the terror of the blank page, and I felt that for sure. Revelled in the nausea of a blinking cursor on a fresh document like it was some rite of passage. But the real horror came afterwards. I had two days to turn those 3000 word chapters, which for me went: draft on day 1, edit day 2. So I’d sit down, and four hours later the blank page wasn’t blank—it was a whole fight scene I had lived through, cried through, bled through. And it felt much like I imagine the first days of motherhood would feel like. This thing was in me, now it is not. Like I had peeled off a layer of my soul for study, and in less than 12 hours I’d need the craft scissors and Elmer’s glue to mash it into something palatable for the masses.

I hated that feeling. Utilitarian. Calculating. No margin for joy. And, yes, maybe the soul-sucking currents were the deadlines. But writing careers are full of deadlines; deadlines even as a hobbies that are what ensure full stories in my world. So at the end of those last Bleed the Wolves chapters, a question came to me as cold and dead in the eyes as a ghost. Do I even enjoy this?

Dark times, that question.

Secondly, I write to communicate myself to myself, and to the world. But this is a slow, slow art form, writing. Even if I could crank out a book every five/six months, that means I have a legible heart maybe twice a year. Worse, by the time people read it and have thoughts, I’m on to the next project and care less. It’s lonely and frustrating and maybe hoping for too much of my little world

Thus, I conclude it’s the process, not the product, you have to enjoy. And maybe it’s the pressure of diving into the query trenches, or the deadlines, or that I desperately need money and the possibility of a few thousand dollars for a manuscript distracts me, but the process hasn’t been very enjoyable for a while now. Has been enjoyable never, actually, since I ‘levelled up’ to the I’m a serious writer floor. And that is a scary thing to contemplate.

Lastly, holy crap no one told you how much you’d have to sacrifice. It is a time costly hobby. Especially to gain the traction within a story my poor little brain needs if it isn’t going to get bored.

Emotionally, it’s a rollercoaster and a half with sometimes faulty seatbelts. I love this, I hate this, I’ll change this and then…, who would even care about this, I’m bored, , , ,….

Again, I say: costly.

Why I shouldn’t quit:

The world needs stories. I have something to say. I think I can tell a story I’d want to read. My voice matters.

Yeah, yeah, insert here all the goopy stuff that is as common place on blogs as the I’m-25-and-know-nothing drivel I had at the start. (All good things and I FULLY reserve the right to post about it all again, in various interactions, throughout all of time). I have no many reasons to write, some of them more personal than the generic mentioned above. But instead let’s move to the crux of it—not the shoulds and shouldn’ts but the reality of my situation.

Why I CAN’T quit:

You’re going to think this is unhealthy, and maybe it is. But I don’t think I can be who I am without writing. And, yeah, some of that identity is tied up in doing something I’m good at, in waking up with a purpose each day, in the hopes of meeting other people that like the same things I do one day. But it’s more than that.

I’m a sponge of a human. I see these white marble counters with their grey pulse lines in my aunt’s house and suddenly the kitchen in the FL’s house in my new urban fantasy looks different. I am sitting before week old wedding flowers left from my cousin’s big bash, and suddenly the colours of the ball gowns in this heist scene are the oranges, dust pinks, and fuchsias of roses. It’s a way of life that goes beyond aesthetics.

It’s my friend calling, facing discrimination and harassment at work, and suddenly a whole societal structure is born in my head as form of protest. It’s doing play therapy with little kids from a war zone, and wanting to put into words why roasting gummy bears with toothpicks and tealights was the best thing I’d done in a long, long time.

Writing is how I love things. How I hate them too, I guess. It’s how I go about understanding the world and setting this to rights that make me sick or sorry or sad or smile.

Like what would I do without the werewolf genre, where I can rail about a world that thinks possessive violence is sexy through the word MINE written over Lianne’s bed? Please, please don’t think too hard about the answer to that. It’s rhetorical.

What would I do if I didn’t write?

Yeah, Hinge might be easier. But what would we talk about over drinks instead?

It is daunting to know I don’t have an answer to the ‘can I enjoy this?’ question when it boils down to process and pain and perseverance. But todays questions is this: would I know how to enjoy life without writing?

I could learn, Lord knows. But I’m not sure I want to. There is something precious to me in these little moments I craft in response to life, like it would be to a type-A Girl Scout when she gets those embroidered patches set on her sash. A inner life of embroidered patches. I lived this. I loved it, or I didn’t. And I fold my heart up into a little origami boat and hope someone somewhere enters into that moment, that emotion iwth me. Even if they disagree, I want to hear about that too, because that is how they love and fix the world in turn.

So the answer is: I am too far gone. Karis writes. It’s a mode of being now, not a hobby.

What I do with what I write remains a malleable decision.

But in the meantime, I tell myself that the sacrifice of time and maybe mental stability is worth it. That the soul-on-a-page feeling is scary, but not dangerous. That Hinge dates are awkward even if you don’t bring sword swings and a cerebellum into it.

Why?

Because the world is worth distilling down into little ink blotches on a page that you share. It is worth celebrating, raving at, crying for, loving, and occasionally disavowing entirely. ;)

So I’ll put my 25-year-old big girl pants one more time, face the little prick of a blinking cursor, and write.