There was a time when I wrote like breathing.
Not every day, but often enough to feel like I had a rhythm. A cadence. A pulse.
And then one day — I didn’t.
No dramatic event. It felt like a series of tragedies and a car in a slow-motion skidding off a winding road and into the abyss of a canyon… or maybe since I am in Kenya… picture driving the Mai Mahiu Road just after the View Point and winding off the banking and into the Rift.
The way my ability to write left me… No grand announcement. Just a quiet grinding to a stop. Like faulty gears whose teeth are stuck.
Suddenly, writing felt like trying to catch a moving train while half-asleep. My ideas came foggy and late. The characters in my head stopped speaking. Sentences no longer danced — they stumbled. Or sometimes sat mute between full stops and elipses.
For a while, I told myself that I was just tired. I’d get back into it “soon.” You know, after I finished that thing, solved that crisis, bought that lamp, reorganized that drawer. Maybe if I got an Apple Pencil so that I could scribble like in a notepad but the words could be transcribed to text. Or maybe I could dictate my thoughts and then transcribe the records. OR I could actually commit to NaNoWriMo.
But “soon” left me by myself in the deep Rift of nothingness.
And then the guilt started stacking.
I’d open my laptop, scroll through old drafts, wince. Start a sentence. Delete it. Close the tab. Repeat.
I even got an expensive Writing Coach… who I ghosted! At least we got to Chapter 3. I still haven’t opened the emails with the notes on Chapter 1 and 2.
People kept asking about my next book. Friends I hadn’t seen in a while asked, “Are you still writing?”
The answer was always a tentative “Yes!”
To which my conscience would scream “LIAR!!!”
Other times, I would narrate my plot story line.
Other still would be met with a near honest, “Sort of.”
What I meant was, “I don’t know how to explain that I’ve lost the rhythm of myself.”
That the comfort of writing was no longer soothing. And the sadness inside me was all wastelands. No words.
So. Here’s what I’ve come to understand:
I didn’t stop writing because I became lazy. I stopped because I was surviving. Because I was tired in the kind of way sleep couldn’t fix. And the feelings I had were like mud or black, tarry, gooey melted asphalt.
I have come to understand that somewhere in all the striving, I stopped listening to myself.
And rhythm — real rhythm — requires listening.
It requires stillness. It requires a lot of honesty.
Presence. And reckoning. The ability to say “Whoosh! I am in a difficult space.” And then to quiet and just allow the soul the attention. I mean the kind of soft attention that’s hard to access when you’re just trying to make it to next week without collapsing. Or wake up without the heaviness of being alive.
Fast forward to this year, something’s shifted. I feel lighter. I feel buoyed (you know like that bobbing orange ball that they keep near boats and things). I’ve started humming again while brushing my teeth. I’ve caught myself narrating random scenes in my head. Started seeing the imaginary spaces where stories form come alive with color again. I’ve started writing things in the margins of my journal and even randomly between meetings on open Word documents… hehehe…
The rhythm is not back in full. But I can hear it again. Faint. Familiar. Like music playing softly in another room.
I feel compelled to follow the sound. Slowly. Steadily. No rush.
Because the thing about rhythm is: it always leaves room for return.