The Writer's Life: When Illness Strikes - The Art and Fear of Being a Writer

 

I recently caught a winter cold, which turned into an infection,  or it came with it, just before Christmas. It was just a cold, or so I thought.

The common cold had taken a backseat in recent times, as COVID-19 got all the headlines. But it has been around a long time; there are about two hundred strains of it. It was just waiting its turn, or a new strain was around. Old or new, I got it from somewhere.

And it was a lingering cold.

A continuous cough is not just something that comes with COVID-19; mine from this simple cold lasted three weeks, and I’m still not over it. The cough pounds away at the rib cage — it’s like going ten rounds with Mike Tyson at his peak.

It all meant that I struggled to write. That’s the way it is when I’m ill. I might have good intentions, that having all that time,  I will write. In reality, that doesn’t happen. Being ill drains any desire to do anything, other than to get over it.

You eat a meal without tasting a bite. You read a message twice and still don’t absorb it. Watch a YouTube video, without taking it in. Somewhere along the way, you forget to write. The hours drag on.

And this is where writing lives.

To be a writer is to exist half a step removed from the world, constantly translating experience into language in a way that, hopefully, someone will like and understand. The writer is always watching, listening, and storing fragments away in the mind for future use. Even in moments of rest, or illness, thoughts are working, shaping sentences, rehearsing conversations, rewriting endings that never happened.

This is the art of it.

Writers notice what others pass by. The pause before someone answers a question. The way light changes a room. The ache behind breathing when ill. Writing turns these fleeting moments into something permanent, something that can be shared. Chaos becomes meaning, and confusion becomes clarity.

But the fear lives here too.

Because when you are always observing, you are rarely still. When you are always inside your head, the moment slips through your fingers. I don’t like writing about illness, but it shows us how vulnerable we are. That ten-mile walk that I could easily do is now waiting for my health and fitness to return so I can do it again. To do it without thinking. Right now, I think no, I’m not ready.

Writers fear silence because it asks them to sit with themselves. They fear failure because words feel like pieces of themselves placed on public display. With illness there is a lot of silence; the hours drag on as you wait for the breakthrough moment of when normal life returns.

There is also the quieter fear: what if I stop noticing? What if I stop writing?

What if the well runs dry?

What if the words don’t come again?

So writers have to keep thinking, even when the body doesn’t want to. I’ve just noticed that it is raining outside, and there is washing on the line. The washing will now have to wait to dry.

Perhaps the art of being a writer is learning when to return. To remember to taste the food again.

Because writing does not come only from absence. It also comes from turning up and writing something.

 

 

Image by Katrina_S from Pixabay