I Wrote About Being a Warrior. Then I Disappeared for Four Years.

Why did this make me feel like a hypocrite?

source: https://unsplash.com/photos/pencil-and-sharpener-on-notebook-page-K3uOmmlQmOo Photographer: Angelina Litvin

Four years ago I published a piece on Medium about writing. About courage, and vulnerability, and showing up on the page even when the words don’t come easily. I gave advice about not giving up on ideas. About not being too hard on yourself. About taking the leap and letting someone read your work.

Then I essentially vanished from the internet.

I have thought about that article more times than I care to admit over the past four years. Not fondly, the way you think about something you made that you’re proud of. More like the way you think about a text you sent that you cannot unsend. It has been sitting in the back of my mind, quietly accumulating interest.

The word that kept coming up when I thought about it was hypocrite.

Here is the thing about giving writing advice when you yourself are a writer: it applies to you too. Painfully, specifically, personally to you. Every point I made in that article about not giving up and being vulnerable and taking the leap — I read it back now and I feel the gap between the person who wrote it and the person who then went quiet for four years.

Except — and this is the part I have had to sit with and be honest about — I was not entirely quiet.

I was writing a novel.

Not as a shield. Not as an excuse. I genuinely was. The book I mentioned in that original article, the one my GP laughed about with her head in her hands, the one I said I was seriously working on — I finished it. After four years of working around surgeries and chronic illness and the particular kind of creative paralysis that comes from being a person whose body regularly interrupts their plans, I actually finished it.

So what exactly am I a hypocrite about?

I have been sitting with that question and I think the honest answer is this: I gave advice about showing up consistently and then I didn’t show up consistently in the specific, visible, countable way that online writing requires. I encouraged other writers to post, to share, to be vulnerable in public — and then I retreated into the kind of writing that happens in private, for years, with no external evidence that anything was happening at all.

And the silence felt like failure. Even when the work was continuing.

There is something about the internet’s relationship with consistency that is particularly unforgiving. If you are not posting, you are not working. If you are not visible, you are not progressing. The metrics of online presence have a way of becoming the metrics of worth, and by those metrics I had nothing to show for four years. Just a manuscript nobody could see, in a folder on a laptop, slowly becoming something I was proud of.

The irony is that the article I wrote four years ago was specifically about the pieces that live on your hard drive for months or years before they are ready. I wrote that. I knew that. And I still could not escape the feeling that my absence was a form of dishonesty.

I am not going to wrap this up with a lesson. I am too aware of where that got me last time.

What I will say is that the novel is finished, and finishing it taught me something about the difference between visible work and real work. They are not always the same thing. Sometimes the most important creative work of your life happens in the dark, without an audience, without engagement metrics, without any external evidence that you have not simply given up.

I gave up plenty of times, in the small daily sense of the word. I walked away from the manuscript for weeks. I questioned whether any of it was worth the effort. I wrote terrible chapters I later deleted. None of that looked like progress from the outside because none of it was visible from the outside.

But it was all part of finishing the book.

So here I am again. Starting with one sentence, the way I told you to four years ago. Showing up, late and a little sheepish, with the admission that I did not follow my own advice in every way — but that I was doing something harder and less photogenic than posting, which was finishing the thing I had promised myself I would finish.

The warrior thing was never about being seen fighting. It was always about not stopping.

I did not stop.

The novel is done. More on that soon.