Why I Stopped Writing (And Why I Started Again)

Winter Thoughts on Return

I am resurgent.

I am dormant, asleep, until needed.
Like a bear in winter’s embrace, I wait.

Patient.

Still.

This is not the end; it is only a pause.

Once I was, and soon I will be again.

---

I am resurgent.

I am dormant, asleep, until I am called upon. Like a bear, I hibernate through winter, gathering strength.

Once I was.

And I shall rise again.

Hail to the New Year

Winter has always seemed to understand something about disappearance.

Trees shed everything ornamental. The landscape empties itself. Animals vanish underground. Lakes freeze over and pretend, convincingly, that nothing moves beneath them.

And yet very little is actually dead.

It is waiting.

Perhaps that is why I have always liked winter.

There is an honesty to a season that makes no effort to appear hospitable.

Cold is cold.

Darkness arrives early.

The trees do not apologize for being bare.

For a while, I stopped writing.

There wasn’t a dramatic decision behind it. I simply began to wonder what the point was.

Words accumulate. Pages disappear into archives. The internet swallows another essay and asks for another million before breakfast.

Eventually, the blank page became easier.

So I left it blank.

For a while.

Then it snowed.

Not much. Just enough to alter the familiar outlines of things.

There is something strangely theatrical about snowfall. The same road, the same buildings, the same branches — and suddenly somebody has redrawn the world overnight.

I stood watching it and thought about dormancy.

And return.

Creep

Around the same time, I found myself listening again to Radiohead’s Creep.

It is a strange song to survive as long as it has.

Its basic ingredients are hardly obscure: admiration, alienation, envy, desire, self-consciousness, the uncomfortable distance between the person you are and the person you imagine you ought to be.

Maybe that is precisely why it survives.

There is a particular kind of beauty that can make a person suddenly conscious of themselves.

Not merely romantic beauty.

Talent can do it.

Confidence can do it.

Someone walking into a room apparently possessing whatever invisible quality you have spent years unsuccessfully trying to manufacture can do it.

For a moment, they seem illuminated.

And you become unusually aware of the shadows.

That tension sits at the center of Creep: the yearning to be extraordinary coupled with the suspicion that perhaps you are not.

I think most people understand that feeling better than they admit.

We spend tremendous amounts of energy constructing acceptable versions of ourselves.

Faster.

Smarter.

Funnier.

Stronger.

More attractive.

More successful.

More interesting.

Special.

And underneath all of that improvement lies an inconvenient question:

What happens if the finished product still doesn’t feel like enough?

The Heretic

That question followed me into Heretic.

I watched the film twice.

Hugh Grant’s Mr. Reed is fascinating because he is both intellectually magnetic and deeply unsettling. He speaks with the confidence of someone who has spent a very long time arranging the universe into a system only he fully understands.

The result is dangerous.

But also compelling.

What interested me most wasn’t whether his arguments about religion were ultimately correct. The more interesting idea was his obsession with originality, repetition and control.

How many supposedly new ideas are old ideas wearing different clothes?

How many convictions are inherited rather than discovered?

How much of what we call identity is simply an elaborate remix?

The film uses Creep as part of that discussion, and the choice works almost too well.

A song about feeling fundamentally out of place appears inside a story populated by people attempting to explain precisely where human beings belong.

Religion.

Doubt.

Control.

Belief.

Fear.

The desire to understand the machinery behind everything.

Perhaps that is why the film stayed with me.

Not because I found some grand answer inside it.

Quite the opposite.

It reminded me how seductive grand answers can be.

A World Made of Mirrors

There are moments when reality feels extraordinarily solid.

Cold pavement beneath your shoes.

A steering wheel beneath your hands.

The first sting of winter air entering your lungs.

Then there are other moments when everything seems slightly artificial.

A stage set.

A simulation.

A world made mostly of mirrors.

I have always liked stories such as The Matrix for that reason.

The fantasy isn’t merely that reality is false.

The fantasy is that somewhere there is a curtain you can pull aside.

A red pill.

A hidden door.

One moment of revelation after which everything finally makes sense.

Reality, unfortunately, is less cooperative.

Even if the universe is a simulation, the alarm still goes off tomorrow morning.

Gravity remains surprisingly committed to the bit.

Bills retain their remarkable sense of purpose.

And winter remains cold.

Perhaps knowing the true architecture of existence would change less than we imagine.

Midnight

The arrival of 2025 found me driving.

There was no dramatic countdown.

No champagne.

No great declaration about becoming a new person at midnight.

Just roads.

Traffic lights.

Long stretches of darkness.

A handful of cars moving through intersections as one year quietly became another.

I noticed the clock change.

11:59.

12:00.

2025.

That was it.

I kept driving.

There was something oddly appropriate about entering a new year in motion.

We place enormous importance on midnight, as though time itself recognizes the boundary.

But the road didn’t change.

The traffic lights continued their indifferent cycle.

Red.

Green.

Yellow.

Red again.

Eventually I stopped somewhere playing karaoke.

Someone sang Creep.

Later came Pink Pony Club.

I stayed for a while and listened.

Sometimes participation is overrated.

There are evenings when simply observing the strange parade of humanity is entertainment enough.

Then I stepped back outside into January.

The year had begun without asking whether anyone was ready for it.

Why Write?

That brings me back to writing.

I used to think writing required an audience.

Otherwise, what exactly was the point?

No one pays you by the paragraph.

The internet certainly isn’t suffering from a shortage of opinions.

And there are approximately seventeen billion more productive things one could theoretically be doing.

But that’s an unnecessarily transactional way of thinking about it.

Writing is useful because thought is messy.

Inside the mind, an idea can remain shapeless indefinitely.

On a page, it has nowhere to hide.

You have to give it a beginning.

Then another sentence.

Eventually you discover whether the thing you believed made any sense at all.

That alone seems worthwhile.

There is another reason too.

Memory is an unreliable archivist.

Entire years compress themselves into a handful of scenes.

A road at midnight.

Snow falling beneath a streetlight.

A song heard at exactly the right moment.

A movie that leaves behind a question you weren’t expecting.

Writing pins a few of those moments in place.

Not everything needs preserving.

Probably very little does.

But occasionally something deserves a page.

Perhaps that is what this is.

Resurgent

I don’t know whether I am “returning to writing.”

That sounds too ceremonial.

Maybe I’ll write frequently.

Maybe I’ll disappear again.

Winter doesn’t promise spring on a particular schedule.

It simply waits.

There is freedom in that.

Not everything absent is lost.

Not everything silent is finished.

Sometimes the machinery is still running somewhere beneath the snow.

And sometimes, after a long enough winter, something begins moving again.

So I’ll leave this where I began.

I am resurgent.
I am dormant, asleep, until needed.
Like a bear in winter’s embrace, I wait patiently.

This is not the end;
it is only a pause.

Once I was,
and soon I will be again.

[Brief interlude of silence]

I am resurgent.
I am dormant, asleep, until I am called upon.
Like a bear, I hibernate through winter, gathering strength.

Once I was.

And I shall rise again.