This Is Me Coming Back

Reflections on reading, writing, and letting myself be

I haven’t written since October. Life got heavier. Writing became harder. Reading didn’t.

The last few months haven’t been easy, and I almost hesitate to write this article. Not for fear of reaction, but for fear of my own honesty. We don’t often talk about what mental health does to our passion projects. Maybe we do and I just don’t see it when I need it most, or maybe I purposefully avoided it while I was down, deep in my own head.

Dramatic, right? Dramatic, but true.

I work a day job, one that demands a lot of me, in terms of time and brain space. The impact this has on creativity and passion projects is larger than we like to admit. We live in a hustle culture. Always moving, always going, always working on the next big thing. Not many people have the privilege of working on their projects full time, and I’m one of them. The balancing act between creating and working for ‘the man’ is hard, and the tightrope skills required to bridge that gap do not come easily. My creative projects took a knock, but the only thing that didn’t was my reading.

Books don’t demand productivity. They don’t ask you to get better first.

There is nothing that I am more grateful for than the power of a truly good story. It’s escapism, it’s joy, it’s belonging.

It’s also empathy, a place to be, somewhere you don’t have to be alone. In this time, I’ve read books that have made me laugh out loud (a difficult thing to do for me), books that have made me cry, and books that have held a mirror up to my life and shown me things I wasn’t ready to see on my own.

Halfway through November, I found myself spiraling. I backed myself into a corner and couldn’t get out. I told myself I wasn’t good enough, no one wanted to read the things I wrote, nobody wanted to watch the content I created, nobody cared. I stopped writing entirely. Only made a couple of social media posts as a Hail Mary to not lose my (very small) audience. Then, for a couple of weeks, I stopped trying. I forced myself out of bed, went to work, came home, and found my way straight back to sleep.

Now, I don’t say this for you to feel sorry for me. Not at all. I don’t even feel sorry for myself. I say it to show that creativity is not linear. There are good times and there are bad, and that, in and of itself, is fine. More than fine. It’s natural.

Books were the only thing that kept me going through it all. Somehow, there was always space for reading, and for those few weeks, that was enough.

I read for myself. I read books that had nothing to do with anything. I read books I loved and books I absolutely hated, and I was grateful for each of them. They reignited my capacity for thought and, in turn, my ability to think creatively.

New Year is always a time of reflection and for setting goals. I was intimidated by this. I saw everyone’s Instagram posts, their TikTok videos with massive aspirations and life-changing projects. I couldn’t relate to these. I couldn’t see myself committing heavily to losing those 20 kilos, or launching a business, or getting that English Lit degree. I was put off. I didn’t set any goals. Until now.

So, these are the things I am promising myself this year:

· To keep reading, even when everything else feels hard.

· To make space for creativity without asking it to save me.

· To treat myself with the same patience I give the books I love.

I won’t say anything more on them, at least not publicly, they’re mine and I’m happy to have them.

I don’t need this year to be extraordinary. I just need it to be honest.

This newsletter is returning the same way my reading did. Imperfect, slower, but present.

As the ink dries,

Riley x