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The Writer Who Does Not Have Enough Time to Write
The Writer Who Does Not Have Enough Time to Write
When your writing job ruins your writing
When your writing job ruins your writing
Two years ago, I was having arguably the worst writing year of my life. I had just resigned from my 18-month music journalist job, and I was working as a culture writer at this magazine/record label/creative movement, where it didn’t feel like the editors liked me much. Now that I think about it, my desperation to be something or branch out of music writing perhaps, might have been off-putting, or maybe they were just disorganised too. I don’t know — that job just did not materialise, and the label owners/editors just moved around me and 10 other people doing the coolest things.
I was envious, but more than that, I was determined to make a name for myself by joining as many publications as possible (hopefully for more money), but I was getting rejected left and right.
Okay, left and right is a huuuuuge stretch. I pitched to three magazines and got ghosted by two, and was gently let down by the other. Looking back on it, I could have definitely persisted, even followed up, but I was 20, and I loathed rejection. To be honest, I still hate rejection. I fell into a really dark place. I could not write, and I felt terribly guilty that my boyfriend at the time had bought me a wireless keyboard and a customised journal that i just could not put to use. I threw myself into my second year instead, and I came out on top. Yet, a question lingered over my weary heart. Who am I when I am not working?
I started working as a way to forget that my mom died. No, I started working so that I would forget that I was ever a person who had a mom to begin with. By throwing myself into tiresome, often exploitative roles, I could feel and do nothing but work. I ventured into music journalism almost out of nowhere— if you asked me why i decided to start writing about music, i would not know why. I did many things in 2021 without justification; I was too busy grieving.
Fast forward to 2025, and I have a two-page CV with four years of experience in writing, copy editing, working at a local municipality (?), and social media management. For my peers, this is admirable, but for my bones? Exhausting. I should have appreciated being an unemployed 20-year-old more. I read more, I procrastinated writing this very newsletter, i watched a movie every night, watched 20 kdramas that year — i just did nothing.
Now at the tender age of 22, I look forward to doing nothing on weekends, and even then, i am often playing catch-up with my thesis or the articles and social media posts i didn’t get to post during the week. My back gets warm randomly, my left eye itches, and my body is a sore mess from not sleeping. Perhaps when I am taking a vacation in Italy two years from now, these years of struggle might strike me as the most beautiful, but with every assigned article, I slowly feel myself losing the passion for writing. Suddenly, I cannot read a Substack essay without feeling guilty that I have yet to write articles on my own website. I cannot scroll on instagram without checking up on how many people liked or reposted our work. I cannot read without thinking about the emails I never got to do.
I cannot stop worrying about the dreams i am not chasing, even though the life i am living right now was a dream to 20-year-old me.
Will my lovers ever fully know me?
Will my lovers ever fully know me?
I am only 23 — I have yet to turn 23, but I am too excited to still be 22, so we will run with it— but I have been in back-to-back long-term relationships for the last seven years. All my loved ones claim that it is I who loves relationships, but as someone who is staunchly anti-marriage and pro-singlehood, I think relationships love me. Perhaps I also have a lack of discipline, or I desperately need therapy (readers, we have covered this already), or I really am the lover girl I am accused of being.
In light of everyone asking themselves if having a boyfriend is embarrassing, I find myself wondering if any man would ever be willing or open enough to truly know me like they know their own palm. Relationships — particularly those with men— can sometimes be a ritual of endless grace, humiliation, teaching men how to be considerate of your feelings. Where there isn’t constant correction, there is complacency.
Something in you that dies and relents to this man being the way he is, because there is really no point in you shouting on the hills that he just does not get it. A part of you that just hopes that he will tire himself out and leave you be. Thus, I have a complex about the #ihatemybf trend, I mean, I laugh at all the videos, but grimace when I see it occur in real life because it should be that simple, right? Let us scream it from the hills: LEAVE HIM!
Yet, the same complex I have should be extended to other women.
A user on Twitter tells you to never open up to a man about your family life, your salary, or how your previous breakup occurred because it is like bleeding in front of a shark; all you reveal will be used against you. A quote tweet challenges, “Then how will he ever get to know you?” I like both tweets guilt-free. The paradox of the dating scene today: be vulnerable and be a loser, or protect yourself from being a loser by never fully opening up. Between hustle culture, taking him for all he is worth, and having as many options on the roster so you are never really disappointed, romance for women starts to feel more like a game where no one really wins anyway, but it is still our burden to ensure that everyone wins.
Cry in a Lamborghini or cry in your broke boyfriend’s beat-up car? Neither for me, but can I truly sit here and say singlehood is the way to prevent either scenario? What right do I have to say that celibacy, self-love prompts, and empowerment are all you need when you seek the companionship you seek? How dare I, or anyone, restrict you?
The only answer I can give is that you accept the love you believe you deserve, and this, I trust, unreservedly. In all my years of living, being in a relationship has been the centre of my development and growth, but this also means I have heard, “You changed me, and I want to be better for you,” and “Thank you for being patient with me and allowing me to grow.”
Even at the gullible age of 16, those words made my stomach twist, because those words were a reward for my self-sacrifice and the beginning of my resentment. Still, maybe there is a small voice inside that finds this sentiment rewarding — and being a caretaker, teacher, and support system is largely what it means to be a girlfriend and lover. These roles transition and shift as circumstances in life do, and the performance never really ends.
Many success stories of men often begin with them thanking the resilience and endless support of the women in their lives, the wives who believed in them when no one did, the mothers who nurtured, and the women who inspired the stories, etc. While this does speak to the undeniable greatness of women (I know and trust this too, unreservedly) — I understand why more women want to break out of the mould of being a supporting character. If you are constantly in servitude to someone’s feelings, ambitions, emotions, systems and disappointments, is there ever really a time when anything in that relationship is about you? Does that man ever really know you, and do you ever really know you? And when that ends, do you hate him more, or do you hate yourself more for accepting it?
Neither girl.
I don’t know, and I do not have the answer; I never do. If I always keep my cards beneath the skin of my palm, is that self-preservation, and what is the point of that self-preservation? If I am never more than someone else’s good patient and loving partner, then how will I ever be sure that I am that person to myself? And if I never know myself, then will my lovers ever truly know me?
Am I bored or am I without purpose: Being in your early 20s, feelings of failure and Little Women quotes
Am I bored or am I without purpose: Being in your early 20s, feelings of failure and Little Women quotes
How long after a singer stops singing do they stop calling themselves a singer?
Every other day, I try to remind myself that I am more than just my flailing writing career. I am not a failure; I am everything but. Before this period of writer’s block, I told just about everyone I met that I was a magazine journalist.
“I am in my second year, but I am also a music writer,” “Oh yes, I work for this magazine called -,” but when I no longer felt like I could attach these titles to who I was, I felt colourless. Purposeless. What happens when you’re no longer doing what your title implies? How long after a singer stops singing do they stop calling themselves a singer?
I started writing as early as age 7, enlisting the help of my two friends to illustrate and publish my first-ever story. (My publisher was really the problem there) And for the rest of my schooling career, I kind of fell in and out of love with writing. Once, abandoning the whole idea of becoming a creative director at a magazine to become an investment banker (I failed Maths so many times), but it was when I joined a student organisation and became chief editor/creative director of their annual yearbook that I realised that I may have a future in writing. Like many other journalists and writers, too, I grew up watching many romantic films and dramas that had writers as the main characters, all trying to form a story while falling in love.
It wasn’t until I turned 18 that I fully pursued journalism. I cannot really place what sparked the idea that I could even write about music or fashion because I had no experience and limited knowledge about these types of journalism. I just knew that 12-year-old me wanted to be a creative director of a magazine because I enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada. I started looking up different SA publications with open writer submissions/applications, and also learnt how to write profiles.
Things were fairly successful for me as much as they could be for a young writer until I hit a wall in April. It took me longer than a month to write articles, and everything was lethargic. Opportunities were much less, and I felt less confident as I kept writing. Not to mention that I had submitted pitches to two publications in the same month after weeks of contemplating how the perfect pitch had to be written, only to be met with silence. It was like a punch in the gut ( I don’t take rejection well) because up until then, I had always had opportunities (unpaid) fall into my lap because I was talented. It was after my third rejection of the year that I decided that maybe it wasnt’t that my lucky girl syndrome had run out, but maybe that I was not as good as I initially thought.
My birthday had just passed, and I had yet to achieve five things on my long list of 2023 goals. I had not lost 20kg, nor had I significantly lengthened my portfolio. Many people around me kept telling me I had all the time in the world and that I needed to take a break because I was only 20, but how is lying in bed, unable to write, suffocating from the looming pressure of having not been the Nthatile I wanted to be before March, not resting? I realised that the rest I needed was a vacation from my own thoughts. But I found my unfinished ideas and failed commitments haunting. This interview and that article were never finished or published, so how could I ignore them? How could I take a break from my potential?
Now at the edge of my 23rd year of living, I find myself in the same predicament: unemployed and in between opportunities. I have to move cities again, but I also kind of don’t have a place to stay. I also recently quit the job that inspired my ‘writer’s block’ piece, and while I was worn and worked to the bone and severely (really undervalued) —I cannot help but miss waking up to take care of the loads of work that felt like my own children. A few days ago, I wrote a sort of vision-board type message to my best friend, pledging to just rest and finally enter my ‘peaceful’ era; committing not only to pause content writing and focus on social media management, but to not fall into the trap of working many jobs at once to feed my addiction to being a hamster on a wheel. When I wrote that, I was truly enjoying the luxury of sleeping most of my day away— hell, I even did that on vacation. Late stage capitalism, the never-ending need to prove myself, job insecurity, money, and the invalid concern that I may never have a corner of the world that truly belongs to me, begets the creeping question: where am I going and what is next?
Quite frankly, I still don’t know. I just have to trust myself, and if you couldn’t tell, I still have to learn how to do that.
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