This week’s Ask Holden question is:
Q: How do you ensure your headspace is safe after diving into deep topics? Especially during edits.
A: Given the heavy stuff I write about, this is a killer question.
And it’s timely.
Recently, books 3 and 4 were at various stages of being read by other people, so I needed something new to write until I got those notes back.
I don’t do well with sitting still. Like most troubled writer types, I seesaw between creative and destructive impulses. If I’m not actively creating, I’ll end up destroying, usually myself.
My instinct was to write a novella I intend to anchor a book-length collection of my short works. (I usually think of this as book 5.)
I spent weeks brewing on the novella, making notes, but when it came to start the draft, I was emotionally tapped out. I couldn’t handle doing that deep dive yet again.
So, this is something I know about intimately.
Let me share what I know works better than just powering through and running yourself into the ground in the process.
1. Know when to take a break
My book 5 novella is akin to most of the fiction I write: it requires me to dive into raw emotions.
When I came to writing it, for the fucking life of me I did not have any fuel left in the tank.
This year has been wildly productive, writing TWO KINGS and INVISIBLE BOYS 2. I have channelled so much into those books.
I like what I do – it’s cathartic and satisfying – but sometimes, I need a break. Time to refill the tank.
That’s where I’m at now.
I often think of Alanis Morissette’s “Losing the Plot” lyric about being “exhausted Midas” when I get to this burnout stage. Sometimes as a creative, you gotta know when to recuperate, or everything you touch will no longer turn to gold – your magic will run out.
The way to do this is to be attuned to your body’s response to writing and listen when it doesn’t want to do it.
I’m good at this now, which is why when I got to the novella, my gut reaction was simple and clear. “Big nope – not feeling it.” It wasn’t my head saying this, it was my gut. My body was like, “Hard pass.”
I stepped away. I’ll only come back to it when it feels right.
2. Acknowledge that dealing with mental health is long-term
In my mid-20s, I disclosed to some family members that I’d experienced intense suicidal ideation in my teenage years. This wasn’t something I’d talked about at the time. The response I got was like, “Oh that’s horrible, but at least you’re all good now!”
I remember thinking, “At what point did I say I was all good now?”
It was a misunderstanding of mental health and trauma and mood disorders.
I felt a similar reaction when I (foolishly) spent the book tour for INVISIBLE BOYS publicly oversharing that story of teenage suicidality. The assumption was that I’d overcome bad mental health, now had great mental health, and it was this past thing that was separate from me.
Possibly I implicitly contributed to that impression. I don’t know.
In any case, for me, my mental health is a long-term journey. It’s something I live with and manage as best I can. It’s a lifelong process of learning how to cope, deal, survive. I am doing the best I can and I am far from perfect at it.
Being aware of mental health as ongoing, rather than past, is important if you’re going to write about it. You need to be cautious of retraumatising yourself. You need to be willing to deal with your own emotional needs first, before trying to write about it to help others.
It’s like the safety cards in a passenger plane. Fit your own oxygen mask before you try to help others. The same thing applies to writing about mental illness. Put your mental health first, over the imperative to be of service to others.
3. Don’t share more than you want to (both in the creative work and the promotion/publicity of it)
At the start of touring INVISIBLE BOYS, I thought utter vulnerability was the only way to promote a book about mental health. I shared way too much: every gory detail. I thought that’s what being honest meant.
It wore me down very quickly and left me shattered after public appearances.
I remember one festival where I’d talked about my mental health to audiences all day, then went back to the house where all us authors were staying. Everyone else was having drinks and a whale of a time. I was just laying catatonic on my bed, dissociating the fuck out. Talking about my mental health all the time fucked me up.
There was one specific gig – in Albany – when I shared something I never wanted people to know. An audience member asked if a particular sexual misadventure in INVISIBLE BOYS had happened to me in real life. I answered that it had, and regaled the story.
But even as I was saying it, I remember thinking, “What the fuck are you doing, telling everyone this?! That’s something private, for you.”
I felt overexposed and so mad at myself for that.
Ultimately, it was useful. From then on, I began to draw boundaries with the publicising of my creative work, and those boundaries saved my headspace.
I have things I don’t talk about at gigs or in media interviews, even when asked. I politely don’t answer, or I deflect, or I move on. I don’t share stuff that’s too private. I barricade off a private life for me to continue leading, that is not the domain of the public. It is a much better way to function and protect myself.
I also stopped being overly vulnerable in blog posts and social media posts. It shook me up too much to keep bleeding on the page so constantly.
I sometimes wonder if my pivot to gym selfies and memes and fun shitposting might grate on some of the people who followed me for my written vulnerability. I assume it does, and I assume those people eventually unfollow me. But my headspace is a fuckton better now than in my early career when I was being a traumatised dancing monkey for likes and attention. That was no good for me.
I now keep that vulnerability channelled into my creative writing itself. My books are the places where I can be emotionally raw.
But I can’t do that on the daily in front of people or I’ll explode.
4. Write from your scars, not your wounds
This is the big one. Sisonke Msimang said this to me when training me in oral storytelling back in 2018 at the Centre for Stories, and it was such a lightning bolt moment for me.
Previous times in my life I have not been so self-protective.
I wrote myself off in 2012 writing my Honours thesis novella. I was not okay. I’d only been openly gay for four years, I hadn’t gone to therapy to process any of the shit I’d dealt with, and I thrust myself into writing about it anyway. I didn’t know any better at the time. I was 24 and thought I just had to white knuckle my way through this story.
Did it work? Kinda. I completed the thesis novella. I got a good grade.
I also was blitzed out of my fucking skull most of that year. Every time I sat down to write, I would drink myself blind to cope with how distressed it made me feel. I had a bit of a mental health crisis.
And once I submitted the work, I was fucked-up long term. I didn’t want to write about gay shit ever again. It took years to get my drinking under control. It took buttloads of therapy to be a functional human being.
My 2012 novella was being written from a fresh wound. It messed me up.
The most important tip for protecting your headspace is to make sure enough time has passed since the trauma happened before you write about it.
I’m not talking weeks or months. I’m talking years.
Sometimes I’ll have someone come up to me in the book signing line and mention they’ve just gone through the gnarliest shit you ever heard, then say, ‘I’m thinking of writing about it now.’
I tell them not to, every time.
You have to process what you went through before you can produce a creative text about it. I don’t want to be obnoxious in saying this so heavy-handedly, but I am reasonably confident in how universal this advice is.
Writing from a fresh wound is dangerous to you and your headspace.
You must wait until it’s a scar, until you’ve healed, before you can dive back in for the benefit of sharing the story to the public.
Which leads to the next point.
5. Writing is not therapy. Therapy is therapy.
There is a lingering sense in many art disciplines that writing – and creativity more broadly – are therapeutic in nature.
To some extent, I get it. And art therapy is a thing.
Given my experiences trying to blend the two, though, I am always cautious about this.
Writing about my experiences of mental illness is not what helped me get better.
The way to treat mental illness is with therapy and other treatments.
For me, it was counselling and somatic therapy that worked for me.
After several years of regular therapy, I was ready to write INVISIBLE BOYS. Even then, writing the draft was intense. I bumped up my therapy sessions more regularly to talk through the hectic shit that was coming up for me as I wrote it.
I can’t extol the virtues of therapy enough if you’re going to write from a place of trauma.
Process the trauma first. Go to therapy. Only write about it when you feel ready.
I have had a literal decade of therapy to help me address various conditions, from your garden-variety depression and anxiety – both of which have wrecked me mentally on many occasions – to more specific stuff I’ve had to deal with.
I could never have written INVISIBLE BOYS or anything since if I had not sought help and treatment for my mental health.
6. Do all the good self-care shit
When we’ve been traumatised or suffered mental health crises or addictions, or all three, caring for yourself can fall by the wayside.
For me recovering from these things, it’s been years of work to undo my self-destructive habits and try to be nice to myself. Again, I’m far from perfect at this and I fuck up a lot.
Self-care is the groundwork for good mental health. A ton of self-care before, during and after writing about hard topics will go a long way to protecting your headspace.
My methods won’t work for everyone – we all have different stuff we prefer.
But here is the self-care stuff I do on the regular, and prioritising these behaviours even more when I am writing helps me keep my head above water:
· Cognitive-behavioural therapy – to talk through what’s going on
· Somatic therapy – to feel through and process trauma in the body (also read The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk)
· Bodybuilding / weightlifting – I lift weights at the gym for a couple of hours five days a week, and use a sixth day for cardio. This has a marked impact on my mood, boosting endorphins and getting me out of my head and into my body.
· Walks in the sun – I use my rest day to take 30-45 minute walks in the sun. Blood flowing, endorphins pumping and Vitamin D – great for reducing stress.
· Massage – When I can afford it, I love a firm massage to relax. I love when the masseuse tries to shove her elbow clean through the back of your rib cage. Bliss.
· Footy – Playing a team sport is a great source of endorphins and camaraderie.
· Substance Moderation – Okay, my love of Woodstock Bourbon is well-known. But I do work hard on moderating my intake of psychoactive substances these days. I don’t think I’ll ever be a saint, but I am doing better than I used to.
· Alone Time – Having quiet, private time in the house makes me more centred. I feel emotionally dysregulated when I’m in public touring mode, and I cannot write during these times. Alone time in the house is golden.
· Music / singing – I listen to music every day. Music saves my life on the regular. I sing in the shower and when I’m driving the ute. A therapist told me singing stimulates the vagus nerve which helps the body feel more grounded.
· Connection – This is where you find out I am just a big soft teddy bear under the muscles, but a nice hug with my husband or a coffee with my family or a drink with some mates goes a long, long way towards self-care and happiness.
There are also lots of things that therapists TELL ME TO DO (with various levels of exasperation) but I am bad at actually doing regularly, such as:
· Breathing exercises
· Meditation
· Journalling
They are allegedly great, but I won’t pretend to be a guru at any of them.
This has been a LONG-ARSE post, so I’m gonna wrap up. But as you can see, therapy and self-care form a big, deliberate part of my life, and I’m passionate about them.
My bottom line is: your headspace matters more than your creative work. Prioritise your mental health over writing about your mental health, always.
I hope this gives you some answers to your question – thank you for asking it.
I’m always open to new ASK HOLDEN questions being submitted – you can send them in via DM, the comments, my socials or my contact form on my website.
Have an epic weekend all.
Holden
Really great piece. Thanks for sharing. :)
Cannot agree with this more. I’ve spent the last 15 months or so building a neurodiversity inclusion network at work that often involved me disclosing parts of myself in retrospect I didn’t need to share, but felt obligated to because people need to understand. There are things you need to keep for yourself and you need to tread that line carefully when sharing details of your own life story with others.
The end result has been my mental health has taken a nosedive and I’m slowly working on building it back up. But it’s amazing how powerful it is and so healthy to draw boundaries and say ‘No, this is for me only’. It does wonders drawing that line to protect yourself. It’s like building a muscle, you have to keep doing it but it’s worth it.
Good for you for making that call and maintaining it. It’s a hard thing to do.👊 gym selfies any day over revealing posts that are costing you mentally.
Hi Holden, I was in the audience at that event in Albany (as I hope to be, every time you visit!) and I remember that question (and your answer). I'm sad and sorry that you felt so overexposed, and I can really empathise -- I hope you have forgiven yourself for what was not really at all your fault, rather a natural response to someone's question. I'm glad that the result was a revised and better approach for you, though, and I agree with all your mental health tips :) Take care xx