I had accumulated 8 Incomplete grades by the third year of my Ph.D. program. I was suffering from an intense ‘writer’s block.’ Everyone experiences writer’s block differently, based on their own unique struggles. My writer’s block was bigger than me, a malaise instilled by family circumstances and global war. I moved from Karachi, Pakistan to the US to begin graduate school in 2009, only a few months after my mother had her first transient ischemic attack. It was the same year that the US extended the War on Terror to Pakistan, raining down fifty-four drones that killed 549 people in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I was not able to separate these occurrences from my writing. I was not able to see coursework as just an academic requirement I had to fulfill for my degree.

During many evenings of my first semester in graduate school, I sat starting at the open books on my desk in my room in the graduate dorm, the fluorescent white light making me feel like I had undergone an alien abduction. I felt panic and a strange sense of being thousands of miles removed from the cursor blinking on the screen in front of me. Maybe I was. I read everything, made copious notes, and yet, I couldn’t actually write. Part of me wanted to succeed. But it was no match for the part of me that wanted to sabotage myself and crush the audacity that had generated any hope for my present or future. It’s not as though I didn’t know how to write academic papers, or that I hadn’t written them before. It was that my feelings of undeservingness hijacked any sense of entitlement towards academic achievement.

I had left a sick mother behind, selfishly immigrating to the Global North to escape a predictably patriarchal middle-class future in Pakistan. Two years later, my mother passed away in a country that I did not have a visa to enter. I felt wracked with guilt, constantly feeling like ‘it wasn’t worth it’ – my writing wasn’t worth it, my academic success would not be worth it. Was ‘what’ worth it, though? I’d been comprehending my life circumstances egotistically, as though I had chosen to further my education at the expense of my mother’s life and health. Wrapped up in guilt, sadness, and confusion, I absconded my responsibility to type on a keyboard to make words happen.

I felt out of place in a country that had started dropping drones on mine the year that I immigrated here. The deafening silence in the US on the War on Terror rendered me unable to externalize my rage against imperialism. Thus, I internalized my rage, turning self against self, colonizing the self through self-sabotage. In the midst of so much death, who was I to luxuriate in the highfalutin harangues of social theory? Writing academic papers in the midst of imperial violence felt like an absurdly surreal affirmation of life.

Being mothered would have affirmed my faith in my own future. Decolonial revolution would have affirmed my faith in humanity’s future. In the absence of either, I became preoccupied with romantic love. Internally blocked from pursuing my true desires of academic achievement and professional success, I directed my wanting towards something that was easier, more trivial, and more immediately attainable. Romantic love, the hall of mirrors such as it usually is, did the job suitably, glowing like a distant mirage in the desert of my despair. The emotional addiction of romantic fantasy numbed me from the painful reality I needed to confront about my family and my academic career. Soon enough, however, the anesthesia wore off, and my pain signaled the healing that, much like my coursework and other graduate requirements, remained ‘Incomplete.’

Over time, whether by will or fortune, I became alone. The connections that had anchored me, faded, and with them, my sense of self unraveled. My family ties, such as they had been, came undone. Transnational Pakistani academic networks dissolved under intense state repression. Stories of people intimidated, disappeared, tortured, or murdered, became too many. A hush fell over what had been a dynamic if fragmented community. I stopped writing about Pakistan.

I missed my people when they went away. But I also enjoyed staying in the state of missing them. It was a cloud that protected me from being fully present in the world around me. Visions of past and future what-if’s whiled away my cloudy loneliness. Numbing into the melancholia gave me a false sense of control. I became the architect, reigning queen, and lone resident of my billowy fog-castle. It felt sad and soft, comfortable in its familiarity.

And then funding began to run out. I became poor, really poor. I was on a student visa that limited my employment opportunities. I became precarious. I watched my colleagues outrun me to claim the success I claimed I didn’t want. As I clapped to cheer them on, it felt like I was clapping my hands very loudly to my own ears, awaking myself from my supposedly-radical, anti-everything stupor.

I struggled to reconcile feminine subjectivity with masculinized academic success. What did it mean to be a leftist Pakistani woman in the masculinized, hyper-professionalized US academe? It seemed oxy/moronic. I railed against the system for a while, witnessing an educational institution restructuring itself to align with a neoliberal financial model that prioritized corporate interests over the arts and humanities. It felt pointless to even try to change the institutions and the external world around me. Though I was jaded, my values did not change. The neoliberal feminist solution to ‘lean in’ at board meetings or their academic equivalent completely ignored the structural oppression of patriarchy. Instead of leaning in, I chose to lean inwards, to lean into myself. I had to answer some questions for myself. What did it mean to occupy the position of an empowered left feminist academic? I associated writing and power with masculinity. I associated success with selling out to neoliberal capitalism. And yet I yearned for self-expression, for the ability to know and articulate my ideas and to experience the development of my intellect. I was fissured internally around a woman/writer dichotomy, but this was a contradiction I both wanted and needed to conquer.

I began by re-organizing my space. I moved out the terrifying phallic emblem from my bedroom: the towering, unanchored, hand-me-down IKEA bookshelf full of books I had half-read for graduate seminars, a daily reminder of how my knowledge was ‘Incomplete.’ In its place, I moved in a shorter bookshelf, only about three feet high. Above it, I hung an emblem of a fertility goddess, a Rumi poster with Arabic calligraphy inviting me into the bliss of the present, an Emily Dickinson bookmark reminding me that hope is the thing with feathers. I filled my bookshelf with books that made me feel hopeful about my future as a writer. I read all the writing advice I could get my hands on. A treatise on writing in the social sciences.[1] A West Coast practitioner who prescribed goddess meditations to invoke the muse.[2] A Black feminist whose lovers had not stood in the way of her writing.[3] A high school teacher who approached writing as Zen practice.[4] But my favorite was a beautifully written and thoroughly researched book that prescribed some healthy writing habits while also letting the reader in on the secret that there was no singular regimen for successful academic writing, so let loose and have fun.[5] On the little bookshelf, a veritably disparate array of disciplines, genres, and racial and gender identities came together with a singular injunction, “Write.” My own desire for writing was fickle as the playboys I chased, showing up occasionally before ghosting me the next day. I needed something more reliable. So, I filled myself up with these writing practitioners’ desire for and discipline in writing, absorbing it like osmosis through physical proximity and daily visual reminders to literally show myself that perhaps I could do it, too.

The stage was set. The lamp light on my desk was dimmed. It was my time to shine.

I took the injunction to heart. I began to write. It dawned on me that the only way to produce writing was to type until words appeared that turned into sentences, paragraphs, and pages. The additive logic of words compounding like that initially astounded me with its force and simplicity. I did not find a magic pill. I did not find a magical person who took my pain away. But I did find a magic process, the magical practice of writing and rewriting words until I liked what the sentence said and how it sounded. And then doing it again, and again, and again. My family life and the world around me had felt violent and chaotic, filling me with fear and anxiety. To my surprise, I found the antidote in writing. I recouped reliability in writing’s rhythms. I noticed how peaceful, comforted, and safe I felt after a writing session. In cultivating a writing practice for myself, I created the structure and constancy I’d been yearning for in other people. I created structure through physical objects. I wrote by sinking into large armchairs that were firm and cushy, that could hold and support me. I wrote in zipped up vests and shawls wrapped tightly around my shoulders. I realize now that I was swaddling myself like a baby. In writing, I became a parent to myself. While I may have felt abandoned by others whom I wanted and needed to love me, I had also been abandoning myself by neglecting my work. Writing brought home my choice in the matter, undeniably so. In every moment, I could perpetuate my self/abandonment, or I could attend to the protracted list of small tasks that academic writing is comprised of. Choosing writing initially felt difficult because it required a psychological separation, a transmutation from likeness to difference in my inner relation with my love-objects. Over time, though, choosing writing became easier and pleasurable because it felt like a self-embrace. It was worth it. I was worth it.

I took up daily meditation and I began to approach writing as meditation, a practice that required daily effort and attention, a practice that was entirely self-contained and yet completely plugged in to life energy. I began to write every day. I consulted tenets of Zen Buddhism. “When hungry, eat. When tired, rest.” So, I did. I wrote. I ate. I rested. Writing became my way of showing up for myself, getting to know myself, of discovering how it felt to spend time by myself, entirely focused on myself, which, up until then, even as a fully grown woman, I had not experienced. Writing initiated a process of self-recognition that I hadn’t experienced anywhere else, not in friendship, family, intimacy, or psychoanalysis. Sitting down to write felt like reconnecting with a close friend, a self-interpellation, saying, “Hey, you! I know you.” There was an incomparable beingness in writing where I felt all me, all mine, body and soul aligned in moments of bliss. Ironically, I’d never felt so ‘full’ of myself as when I entered the humbling hard work of writing.

I came head to head with my intellectual arrogance. Why was my genius not translating on the page! Surely, the fault lay with the medium. I wrote down a Buddhist proverb somewhere I could read it every day: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I interpreted it to mean that enlightenment or its quest isn’t an escape from life’s ups and downs or from hard work. I surrendered metanarratives for sociological simplicity. I realized there was no Big Idea – mine or somebody else’s – that was coming to save me. There were only the small ideas that I could string together, knitting them into a scarf of meaning that was completely contingent on connection.

I checked in my contempt for anything remotely associated with academic professionalization. It was heavy baggage that I had been lugging around for far too long and had become overly identified with. My pendulum swung the other way and I plunged myself into skills-development. Learning how to plan my writing projects and manage my time quelled my anxiety, freeing up mental space for my ideas and freeing up my evenings for self-care and leisure. I indulged my inner child with the cutesy color-coding of my calendar to differentiate writing from teaching and professional development activities. At times I felt lonely, so I joined writing groups, writing retreats, and academic success programs. I gave myself permission to have needs and meet them. One of my biggest breakthroughs was the realization that other people struggled with writing, just like I did. It turned out I wasn’t so alone, after all. Writing was an experience shared by writers.

From my desk, I saw the maple tree outside my window change over time, cycling repeatedly through bloom, decay, and degeneration, surviving the winter freeze to magically regenerate and rebloom again in spring. With the seasons, my life, too, changed. I changed. My yearning and my yearning for yearning subsided. The longing for a nebulous unknown, the lost object, the circuitous, endlessly looping, Lacanian desire for desire to desire simply loosened its grip on me. Realizing I’d seen through its façade, desire disintegrated like Cinderella’s disenchanted pumpkin carriage at midnight. It was okay because through my writing, I had made a life for myself that I didn’t need to be rescued from. In place of the feeling of lack and not having, meditation gave me an appreciation of all that I already possessed. I closed my eyes and focused on the breath circulating in my lungs, nourishing and replenishing my entire body. I pressed my palms around a crystal. It felt cool, smooth, and heavy against my skin, here for me, mine to have and to hold. I had myself. I had everything I needed.

I de-mummified myself. I’d been using my critiques of academia and even my left politics like bandages to inoculate myself from the heartbreak and loss I’d experienced. The numbing cocoon had been protecting me from the uncertainties of life and from feeling my own shortcomings too acutely. Writing, even academic writing, felt so viscerally personal, that I had to fully be there, to fully be me, in order to do it. So, I took off the bandages and became alive again. I felt exposed without my armor, but also soft and touchable. I felt vulnerable, but I also felt the air caress my bare skin. Not writing had felt like a drug to escape the ugliness and brutality I saw within and without me. Writing felt like recovery, showing me the beauty and vitality within and without me. Writing showed me that life is worth living, worth loving, worth writing for.

[1] Becker, Howard S. Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book, or article. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[2] Metzger, Deena. Writing for Your Life: Discovering the Story of Your Life’s Journey.(San Francisco: HarperOne, 1992).

[3] hooks, bell. Wounds of passion: A writing life. (H. Holt, 1997); Sternburg, Janet. The Writer on Her Work: New Essays in New Territory. Volume II. (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

[4] Goldberg, Natalie. Writing down the bones: Freeing the writer within. (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2016).

[5] Sword, Helen. Air & light & time & space. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).