A Writer’s New Year Reflections: The 6 Gifts I Gave Myself in 2021

Another new year brings another new opportunity for reflection and re-centering. As I talk about nearly every year, my preference for the New Year is to focus less on resolutions for the year ahead and more on reflections of what I experienced and gained in the year past. For me, as I think for many people, 2021 was full of challenges. A year ago, I ended 2020 with the realization that in some strange way it was one of the best years of my life; 2021 was certainly a momentous year, but it was a lot harder.

On the personal front, it was a year that started with a severe eyestrain that lasted for months and limited my screentime, followed by a reinjury of a disc in my back. Then came a health scare with a close family member that shook me to my core (but which, happily, is currently resolved). And then in the fall, I undertook my second major interstate move in three years (which is still rather in medias res, so that will be a story for next year).

On the writing front, it was a year like no other. It was the year in which I chose to face my ongoing burnout and writer’s block head on and give myself permission to not write fiction for a full twelve months. In many ways, that decision turned out to be the one that defined 2021 for me. It is a decision I have not regretted for a moment (although there were plenty of moments when it scared me). In the end, it was a decision that turned out to be a tremendous gift from myself to myself. Now, as I reflect back on the year and what it brought me, what I see beyond all the difficulties are all the gifts.

6 Gifts I Gave Myself in 2021

Usually, in my New Year post, I talk about the lessons I learned from the past year. But this year, I realize the one major lesson I learned was that the “gifts” I gave myself were invaluable—and should be repeated every year.

So here’s a look at the six gifts I gave myself in my Year of No Writing—and why I believe they were profoundly life-changing.

Gift #1: Rest (Taking a Break)

Like many people I struggled to write my fiction in 2020. For me, the impact of the profound global shifts that happened in that year came hard on the heels of several years of personal crises. I was already running on fumes and trying to understand how to grapple with the practical and physical effects of burnout, not to mention a severe case of plot block with the fantasy sequel I was trying to write. I puttered through most of 2020, either half-heartedly trying to write my fiction or distracting myself with other writing-related chores. By the beginning of 2021, I knew I was facing a decision. I needed to take a break. I needed to stop trying so hard for so few results. I needed to take a step back, give myself some space, and truly evaluate what was happening with my relationship to my fiction writing.

In some ways, deciding to take a “conscious sabbatical” from fiction for an entire year was easy. After all, I wasn’t really writing anyway. But in other ways, it was one of the hardest decisions I’d ever made. What if once I quit, I never started again? What if I had no more stories to tell? What if my burnout never got any better? (And as I write this at the end of December 2021 I still don’t know what answers I will discover in 2022.) Regardless all the doubt, deep in my gut, I knew it was the right thing—maybe the only thing. And everything in me breathed a sigh of relief.

What I Learned: For so many of us, there can be such fear and guilt around the idea of not doing (whether it’s not doing writing or whatever else). But the fear and stress of the pandemic has brought many of us to the limits of ourselves in new ways. Often, this feels like failure. It’s not. What it is is a certain kind of death: the death of the old ways. And out of death comes rebirth. Reaching our limits means growth. But we cannot surpass those limits if we’re not first willing to admit they’re there. I daresay we’re all growing into new people these days. This decade will probably change us all in ways we may never have experienced thus far in our lifetimes. To try to cling to the ways that “used to work” when they no longer function, for whatever reason, is only to waste precious energy. Sometimes taking a step back and just resting is the bravest thing we can do.

Gift #2: Permission (Presence)

Once I’d stepped out from under that ever-present pressure in the back of my mind that said I should be writing, I found a little space to look up and look around. And what I found was myself. Not myself as I wanted to be. Not the ideal self that, with a little willpower and effort, could do everything I wanted her to do or thought she should be able to do. But the self that actually was. The self that was burned out, exhausted, scared, and really didn’t want to write.

2021 was a year of practicing permission with myself: the permission to just be as I am and to be present with the reality of myself in any given moment. Do I want to write? Do I want to dreamzone? Do I want to read Proust, or do I really just want to read Pratchett? Do I want to read dark fantasy, or do I maybe just want to re-read a favorite romance?

Sometimes it wasn’t even about “want to.” Sometimes the last thing I wanted was to sit with my own discomfort, to ground into my own body and feel what was actually there. But all those scared parts of me, they wanted me to be present. They wanted me to pay attention, to sit there with them, and to listen. Part of giving myself permission to just be meant having the discipline to practice that presence.

What I Learned: Mostly, what I learned was… I’m not very good at presence. :p The other thing I learned was that it gets easier with practice, and the more I practiced presence, the more I got to know all my parts. With that came a certain ease with myself—with my fears, with my not-writing, with all the things I really do want rather than just the things I think I’m supposed to want. One thing I found was that, yes, I do still want to write stories. But to find those stories, I have to be able to listen to the deeper parts of myself and discover what is truly there to be told.

Gift #3: Attention (What Isn’t Said)

I boss myself around a lot. And I’m not always very good at listening to myself. This is undoubtedly why I got myself into the predicament of burnout in the first place. There’s a joke in the MBTI personality-typing community that INTJs (me) are the “coldest humans,” while our fellow introverted intuitive thinkers the INTPs are the “warmest robots.” But I’ve always rather related more to the robot bit. Part of my work in recovering has been to stop assuming I can run my life like a computer programmer typing code. Basically, I need to shut up more and just listen—to my instincts, to my intuition, to the rhythms and cycles of life around me.

Let me tell you: it’s so much easier to be the author of the story than it is to be one of the characters! It’s much easier to say, “Here’s what I want to have happen, and here’s how it will be so”—rather than to say, “Oh, gosh, look at that writing on the wall.” This is not to say that autonomy and intention aren’t powerful forces, but neither can we wish away the actual circumstances in which we must build our lives.

For me, staying present and paying attention to the truths of my own deeper wisdom sometimes meant seeing things I would rather not have seen—at least in the beginning. One of those things was a deep inner sense that after living for the last three years in the little farmhouse I loved, it was time to go. I’d had a sense almost from the first day I moved there that I would only be there for three years. After some deep and difficult soul-searching in the early summer, I decided to initiate a move, uncertain exactly where I would be going. As it turned out, my elderly landlady died just weeks before my designated moving day. Her children were waiting for her death to sell the house, so I would have had to go this year anyway; if I hadn’t listened to myself, I would  have been stuck in a much more uncertain and stressful situation. Call it a coincidence, but one way or another, it was a gift I wouldn’t have received had I not been paying attention.

What I Learned: Pay attention, even when you’re afraid you won’t like what you see. Respond to the situation that is, not the one you want it to be. And (hardest for me) be flexible. Life works so much more fluidly when we respond rather than react, but the ability to respond is predicated upon presence. Moving this time was still hard and sad in many ways. The responsibility for the decisions and the work was still on my shoulders. But because I was trying to work with life, I felt held through the process. Even though the outcome was the same, it felt like I got to make the decision instead of having the decision made for me.

Gift #4: Discipline (In Flow, Not On Push)

“The Year of Rest”—it sounds so, well, restful. In some ways, it was. The parts of my brain that most needed rest got it. But, really, that was only so other parts could get the benefit of all my energy. And even if I was letting certain parts of myself take a break and feel taken care of, other parts of myself were the ones that had to take care of me. My mom tells the story of how when I (her first child) was born, she looked me and she looked at herself and she said to me, “Well, somebody has to be the adult now, and it isn’t going to be you!” I often think about that in regards to my grown-up self. I look at myself in the mirror and I joke, “Well, somebody has to be the adult now!” Even in a year of no writing, work still had to be done. I still had to keep up with my business, pay the bills, buy the groceries.

Indeed, in some ways, it was a very productive year. My biggest project was writing the blog series/future book about archetypal character arcs—something I’m as excited and passionate about as any of my fiction stories. So even though I was “taking a break from fiction,” I wasn’t “taking a break from life.” I was still showing up every day, doing what needed doing, because no matter how important presence and spontaneity may be, they still require a supporting framework of order from within which to operate.

What I Learned: There’s a sweet spot right at the juncture of discipline and presence: it’s the ability to be in flow. Routines are still my secret weapon in life, but I’m learning to use them “in flow” rather than “on push.” It’s like what I learned, when writing my barnstorming novel Storming, about being in an old-fashioned airplane. You need the engine to get you into the air, but once you’re up there, you can turn it off and just glide for a while. Crafting daily routines to allow for maximum productivity with minimum effort is something I’m always playing with—and the spontaneity of life demands that those routines evolve from time to time.

Gift #5: Goodness (Want to, Not Have to)

This was a year in which I sought to fill up on goodness. That’s not always easy to find when you’re engaged in intense shadow work in the midst of a global crisis. But I knew part of my struggle with writing is that I let the well run dry. So I made it a point to, first, avoid everything I could that sucked energy and goodness out of my life (for one thing, I cut even further back on social media).

Second, I focused on finding the juiciness in life wherever I could. If there was something that didn’t bring me joy and I didn’t have to do it, I didn’t. If there was something I had to, I tried to turn into a ritual of sorts, tried to find a way to the heart of whatever blessing it was offering.

What I Learned: This plan didn’t always bring me joy and ecstasy, of course, but one thing it did do was help me stay present. It helped me keep asking myself, “What do I really want here?” Surprisingly, the answer wasn’t always, “Whatever is easiest.” Sometimes the answer was something really hard, like moving. But other times, it was just a matter of buying myself good dark chocolate or taking a walk under the full moon or calling someone out of the blue just because I really wanted to talk to them. And, slowly, slowly, I do feel the well refilling. It hasn’t happened overnight, and I don’t even feel like it’s mostly back to full capacity. But there has been a subtle shift in the way I look out at the world. There has been a small rekindling of the wonder from which the stories used to burst into flame. That gives me hope.

Gift #6: Reclamation (Gifts From My Past Self)

In the final month of 2021, I was able to receive some unexpected gifts from the me that used to be—the me that wrote stories. I have spent the last month or so revisiting my old novels, re-reading them (and, in the case of Wayfarer, listening to it being brought to life in the full-cast audio dramatization from Sargent Family Productions). Sometimes I get a little cringe-y about revisiting old works, but this time, it felt like revisiting old dear, dear friends. It felt like revisiting benevolent ghosts of myself.

And… it makes me want to write again. I still don’t know what stories I have yet to tell. Maybe it will still be sequels to some of those I’ve already written. Maybe it will be new ones entirely. Maybe it will be new genres and experiments. Maybe it will be another year or even more before the well is completely refilled and I have found out who I am in this new and shifting paradigm of ours. But when I get present with myself… and really pay attention… and ask myself where goodness is to be found in my life… my eyes keep drifting over to the row of books on my shelf.

And so I think what I have learned is what I have always believed—that the struggle is the glory, that all who wander are not lost, and that every story comes full circle. In this time, in which we are all struggling and wandering at least a little bit, I hope that brings you a little of the encouragement and the confirmation that it does to me.

God bless you and happy New Year!

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What “gifts” will you try to give yourself as a writer in 2022? Tell me in the comments!

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