If you write really fast you can outrun your anxiety

If you write really fast you can outrun your anxiety

I just read an essay by Sasha Chapin¹. He says writing should be easy — easy, unless you’re an NPC. Now the only way to prove my humanity is to keep writing, so write I will. Writing should not be onerous. Why shouldn’t the words flow as silkily and readily as Dumbledore’s thoughts when he tapped his basin for the mind, the Pensieve?

Sasha Chapin has an answer for that too - we are making it harder for ourselves. Writing can be an exercise of streaming the consciousness. But doing so requires letting go of our inner critics.

(Fun fact: some people don’t have an inner monologue. What are the anxiety rates like in that subpopulation? Do they write faster? Did James Joyce not have an inner monologue? Kissinger too perhaps?)

We make writing harder for ourselves. Instead of thought-to-text, we inadvertently do thought-to-judge-to-question-my-whole-life-to-flounder-to-scroll-twitter-to-text. I’m sorry if that was hard to parse, I won’t judge if you skipped the whole middle of that hyphenated hodgepodge. What writing really does is astoundingly simple: it doesn’t give you time to invoke your inner critic! So out pours the avalanche of thought, shockingly authentic too. Authentic doesn’t have to mean original or groundbreaking. But it does mean your writing will be true to you.

The one lesson I’ve been staring at, that’s been popping up in every part of my life, to do what’s true I have to be present in every single moment. I meditate every single day. I try to at least. I used to think I was buying back 15 minutes of lucidity and quiet. But what matters more is the other 23 hours and 45 minutes as I go through my day — ekeing out another sentence for this piece, moving rectangles around on my Figma canvas, marinate in the unsaid paragraphs in between the frames of a video call back home. The real goal of those 15 minutes on the mat is mindfulness in every second I am not sitting. Selfishly, it is so I can remember who I am and act-speak-be with ultimate clarity and intent. I am tempted to write How are we ever going to align the AIs if we don’t learn to align ourselves? But the Wittgenstein on my shoulder chastises me, so I have to put it in quotes.

It is very freeing to write like this. I am careful not to look too closely at what I have already laid down in the paragraphs of yore, for I would 100% cringe with embarrassment. I can only do this if I keep looking forward with hope. And if I do look back, let it be with grace. I can have compassion. And I can aim it at my own soul.

The catastrophizer in me is worried - when will this run out? There’s no way we just unlocked a magic formula to spontaneously conjure meaningful strings of glyphs on paper! Hundreds of words in minutes?! The regret-maxxer whispers to me, “The best time to have learned this would’ve been 10 years ago.” I SCREAM at the top of my lungs: I AM OKAY WITH THE SECOND BEST TIME. RIGHT NOW.

I knew this all along too. In high school AP English class Ms. B was disappointed that I was wasting my potential. This was after I turned in an essay that was, admittedly, not my best work. I was losing sleep over AP Physics labs and nothing was going the way it was supposed to. When was the last time I had gone to bed? If I failed to write an essay, it was not from a lack of trying. I stared at the screen, at the Google Docs window, hours were spent in blinks — the cursor and my eyes. I was just in a pre- ADHD diagnosis and self compassion era of my life.

I never felt writer’s block during timed examinations. I could churn out better essays in those 1.5 hours, locked in a room with pencil, paper, and the old wall clock, than I could in 15 hours at home, the internet at my fingertips, and a fancy digital word processor. I knew something was off, how was I getting near perfect on an essay I wrote in 90 minutes and yet almost tanking a homework assignment?

Ritalin is decent, if you’re in a pinch, but I recommend writing faster than you can stop to think. It’s the best cure for writer’s block.²

1. If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying

2. Write Faster (1/30)