Sandhya Menon: writer of things for teens.

It happens to all of us at some point. Your creative train is merrily chugging away and you, the engineer in the driver’s seat, are enjoying the beautiful mountain vistas. The train takes care of itself; it’s on a kind of autopilot at this point in your life. You take it for granted, even, that you’ll always find it this easy, that you’ll always be this creatively unburdened.

And then.

The train seems to hit a very solid, but invisible, wall. There are gears grinding and brakes screeching and hot, angry sparks flying all around you. You try to get the train going again. You coax it like the loving and patient saint/earth mother you are. Then you throw a few very colorful swear words its way to see if that does anything—after all, words are magic and that’s why they call it ‘spelling.’ Finally, you get out and kick the wheels. You inspect the track. All seems fine. Everything is just as it should be. The only problem is, you’re not going anywhere.

I will admit to being the type of writer who took my creativity for granted. Not in the sense that I didn’t appreciate it—I did, immensely. I was grateful for it every day and loved reading about other people’s creative routines because doing that infused me with electricity. There was nothing more I enjoyed than the feeling of sitting down at my desk, relishing the fact that I was about to being a magical few hours of working my dream job. But I never thought I’d come to a point in my life where I would just stop writing.

I’d had little setbacks before, sure. There were times when the writing was hard and the words were slow, and I had to reach in and draw them out a bit at a time like scared baby rabbits in a burrow. I’d leave a piece of a carrot by the entryway and step aside, knowing it was only a matter of time before my offering was accepted.

But then 2021 happened. Around the fall of that year, my mental health tanked and I found a very inconvenient (and, frankly, devastating) side effect was that my creativity had dried up. I don’t mean I just didn’t feel like writing. I mean I sat at my desk, laboring over a story I was trying to tell, and everything that came out was wooden and uninspired. Worse, I was completely closed off to the creative spark that lights a fire in the writerly brain when you’re in a flow state. Not only could I not write, I’d become someone who felt uncreative. I had no ideas in my brain. My characters stopped talking to me. And slowly, writing became a chore.

I cannot tell you how utterly soul-crushing the feeling was. If you’re a creative person, you might understand. I was bereft; I felt like my identity as a creative, as a writer, had fallen away.

For the first time in forever, I went two whole years without writing a book. I watched my fellow writers’ careers continue to blossom and grow. And I sat there in the dark, feeling destitute and wrong.

I berated myself incessantly. You should be writing. You’re not being productive. You’re being lazy; no one else seems to be having this problem. And on and on it went.

Until I finally gave myself permission to stop. I told myself that if my creativity didn’t come back, that was okay. I had gone to school to get a professional degree for this very reason, after all. I could still support myself and my family if need be. But for the moment, I gave myself permission to just do nothing. To sit on a chair with my dogs and a cup of tea. To stare out the window at grass waving gently in the breeze. To cry and watch an ungodly amount of rom-coms and documentaries.

This is when things began to get marginally better for me. By giving myself permission to take a step back, by trying not to equate my self-worth with my productiveness, and by acknowledging that my mental health was more important than being able to write 350 pages in a few months, I was, without quite knowing it yet, inviting my creativity back in. But I wasn’t grabbing her hand and tugging to dislocation like I’d been doing. This time, I let her do her thing. Go dance in the sunshine for a while, go on vacation to Europe and make some Norwegian friends. You know. The usual.

Meanwhile, I took care of myself. And as the months passed, I began to check in with myself. Was there anything creative at all I felt like doing? It turned out there was, only it wasn’t writing. It was painting. So I let myself bust out my paints and brushes and made some truly horrendous art. But you know what? It was fun. And I hadn’t been acquainted with ‘fun’ in quite a long time.

A few months–and sketchbooks–later, I realized I wanted to dip my toes into writing again. I made a mistake by trying to plot a new novel. My creativity immediately curled up into a tight ball in the corner of my office and began sobbing. So I let her be and came back the next day. This time, I decided to write something in a little notebook, just for myself. It didn’t have to be perfect; it didn’t even have to be good enough (good enough for what, you ask? I don’t know. It’s not like I had an editor in a cardigan and round glasses perched on my shoulder reading.).

And doing this, I began to again…have fun. Fun! I tried not to think about it too much. I just went with it. Every day I’d sit down and write something—bits of a story I didn’t know anything about, poetry, a beautiful sentence that popped in my head. I filled pages doing this, writing without a destination or a roadmap.

Did this automatically unlock my book-writing ability again? Sadly, it did not. However, what it did do was make me feel a tiny smidgen like myself again. Okay, I thought. So my creativity isn’t having a midlife crisis. She hasn’t run away with just the money in her pocket and the clothes on her back to hitchhike across America. It was a relief of the greatest magnitude. I began to think regaining some semblance of control over my brain might be a possibility.

Eventually, I would sell two more books and even write them! But that was still a year and a half away at that point.

Looking back, there were a few things I did (besides those I’ve already talked about) that helped edge me back on the path toward myself. In no particular order, they were:

  • Going on a lot of walks. I don’t know what it is about walking, but it helps my brain get into creative mode. Even just fifteen or twenty minutes outside is sometimes wildly useful.
  • Going to therapy. Therapy is losing a lot of its stigma, thankfully, but there are still some communities that see it as a moral failing or “only for crazy people.” I am vehemently in the camp of “everyone should go to therapy for at least three sessions.” I think it can be immensely enlightening and with a good therapist, you can achieve more growth as a human than you ever thought possible.
  • There were days I didn’t do anything. (It’s easier for me because my kids are teenagers and in school most of the day.) I would brush my teeth and get into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. And then I’d just lounge around. I felt guilty doing it, but you know what? Looking back, I’m so glad I still did it. Resting helped my brain heal.
  • Letting people around me know I was struggling. My instinct was to isolate like a little bat in a dank cave. I was ashamed of what I thought of as my “failings.” I felt like I was failing in every part of my life: As a mother, a wife, a dog owner, a writer, a friend. But eventually, I realized if I didn’t tell people what was going on, it would not only hurt me, it might hurt them, too. My friends were happy I told them (of course they’d noticed my sudden reclusiveness), and they were incredibly supportive.

I also told my agent what was happening so she wouldn’t think I’d quit my writing career and joined a hippie commune somewhere. Again, she was incredibly supportive. Absolutely no one made me feel bad about this. (Except me, of course.) And that felt so, so good.

So if you’re struggling with your creativity right now, I just want you to know it’s okay. If you can’t give yourself permission to rest and do nothing, let me give it to you. You are absolved of having to be productive all the time. You are absolved of your duties as a creative person, whatever you imagine those to be. And you are allowed to let your tired mind be quiet, even if only for a few moments of every day.

You will come back to yourself. This may take a meandering path; it will probably take longer than you want it to. But eventually, if you’re still and kind and patient, you’ll wake up one day as the newest version of yourself. And that, my friends, is a thing of beauty.