Anyhoo I’m dressed like I listen to The Black Parade on the regular because time isn’t real and life’s too heavy as it is to follow arbitrary rules.

This is all to say the way to combat writer’s block is to trust yourself. A great teacher once told me that sometimes you have to let your unconscious figure something out before you can produce something. I really believe that.

Ironically it’s trauma that brought writing back into my life and to add even more it was writing that helped me process a lot. I’m grateful for that experience, as painful as it was. It helped me see that I was wrong and honestly I’m more creative now than I was before.

That burnout continued for years, until I found myself with a panic disorder diagnosis with some agoraphobia and PTSD thrown in for good measure. As I got better, I started to think that my creativity was tied to my mental illness and if I had to sacrifice it for sanity, I would.

In my master’s program, I was starting to have the symptoms of burnout and I confessed to someone that I thought about quitting and writing mysteries. That got ridiculed which reinforced my belief that academia required sacrifice and that meant I couldn’t write creatively anymore.

And I would write and write until it was out of me. Creativity came in bursts, chaos magic I couldn’t control or harness. Then, during my junior year of undergrad, I had the sudden thought that ‘serious people did not write fanfic.’ So, I stopped.

I think I come up with dope character dynamics