On Not Writing

Anxiety, a crisis of confidence, the yips, and me

In June 2000, New York Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch walked out of a game against the Chicago White Sox. It was the sixth inning, and the infielder had already committed three errors– weird errors. From a fan’s perspective, it looked like the former American League Rookie of the Year had forgotten how to throw a baseball. The New York Times writeup of the incident was headlined “BASEBALL: After Three Errors, Knoblauch Walks Out.” 

Knoblauch had been the American League Rookie of the Year in 1991, playing for the eventual World Champions (and my forever home team) the Minnesota Twins. He’d been voted to the All-Star team four times. He’d been a solid infielder, a quick, reliable small ball hitter, a dangerously gutsy base runner. 

After being traded to the Yankees in 1997, Knoblauch developed what’s known in sports as “the yips,” a sudden and mysterious phenomenon where an athlete can no longer perform a basic move they’ve performed countless times. It doesn’t just happen in baseball– tennis pros suddenly forget how to serve, gymnasts forget how to spot the ground during aerial moves (known as “the twisties,” it sidelined Simone Biles during the last Summer Olymics), golfers forget how to put. Nobody knows why it happens, and there’s no guaranteed way to fix it– sometimes seeing a sports psychologist works, sometimes it doesn’t. After that game in June 2000, Chuck Knoblauch was moved to the outfield. He would never play second base in the major leagues again. 

Years later, the Minneapolis Star Tribune caught up with him in a brilliant piece of sports journalism by Amelia Rayno. The former Twin was living in Houston, a city where he’d never played, in a house that contained no signs of baseball at all.

[Knoblauch’s] house holds no reminder that, 20 years ago, Knoblauch was a feisty 5-8 second baseman wrapping up a Rookie of the Year season with the Twins. There are no mementos from the 1991 World Series championship that followed, from the three titles he won in New York or from his four All-Star appearances. There are no hints of his 12 seasons in the majors at all.

The memories on his walls are of smiling faces in family photos. His living room is filled with board games.

Fifteen miles away, in the condo where Knoblauch spent his offseasons as a player, boxes line the walls. All of it is junk. That's what he told his real estate agent when he gave her instructions to toss the stuff.

She opened one of the boxes and found a Gold Glove.

(Knoblauch was arrested on domestic violence charges the same day the Star Tribune article posted.)

I think about Chuck Knoblauch a lot.

The idea that a person could just forget how to do something they love scares the shit out of me, and so, anxiously, I dwell on it. The more I ruminated on the yips, the more inevitable their onset felt. Maybe I already had the yips! Maybe something easy and automatic to me was about to become impossible! Maybe I’ll become so ashamed about my lost abilities that I’ll banish all remnants of it from my life!

The Yips walking straight towards me. / It Follows/ Northern Lights Films

My fear began to feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy, a paranormal monster summoned by merely thinking about it, like the curse from It Follows. I worried I’d forget how to dress myself or act in public. Sometimes when stopped at an intersection, my brain intrusively would wonder what would happen if I suddenly forgot how to drive, right then. 

I worried the yips would come for my writing. Writing was my sanity and my savior, from the time I was a lonely and boy crazy middle schooler cataloging every interaction with my crush in a my spiral notebook journal to the time it literally saved me from working indefinitely at a dead-end job at a bank. The first time I ever got paid to write anything, I was twenty-seven years old. When the check arrived in the mail for a full day’s work and thousands of words, I gazed at it like it was the face of a lover and thought, I’m a real writer. I’m a real writer. The check was for $100. 

A lot of writers complain that writing is the worst– and the parts of it that are terrible are truly terrible– but on balance it’s always sustained me. A blinking cursor was always a cheeky little beacon of frustration and possibility, like returning home hours after a curfew, a light on in the front room. I didn’t know if I’d walk into the house to a lecture from an angry partner who was worried sick about me or the easy joy of a stoned roommate who had ordered a pizza they wanted to share with me, but regardless of who was inside and how annoying or fun the next ten minutes would be, the light was on because somebody cared. 

Lately– to torture the metaphor– the light hasn’t been on for me when I come home to a blank page. The house is cold. There’s no food in the fridge. There are no sheets on the bed. There’s no bed! I don’t even remember the layout of the house! When I sit down to write, I freeze. 

The yips have come for my writing. I’m Chuck Knoblauch, without the legal problems and the Shame Condo. 

I’ve been trying to write something for the last week, and every time I try it ends in me feeling terrifyingly confused. Am I understimulated? Overstimulated? Is anything interesting? Is nothing interesting? 

I’ve tried unsticking whatever is stuck, going on a walk or reading something or listening to music, all of the tricks that used to work to get me back in a groove of thinking creatively. I’ve tried to just sit down and write whatever came to mind, but the only thing that has come to mind is the feeling of not being able to write.

One of the best scenes from 30 Rock was the one when Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy over-thinks his acting and gradually turns into such a head case that he forgets how to walk. 

That’s it. That’s how I’m feeling. 

Everybody goes through phases where they feel less inspired, especially creative people. Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum made one of the greatest indie rock albums of the 1990’s and then disappeared for decades. J. D. Salinger wrote a handful of slim little volumes perfect for procrastinating high school freshmen trying to meet their independent reading quota in the last two weeks of the semester and then he lived the rest of his life as a reclusive cousin-lover. 

The problem, after contemplating on what’s not working for what feels like years but is actually weeks, is that I’m stuck between what writing requires and what parenthood has done to me. 

Writing requires audacity. Who am I to write– who is anybody to write? Who am I to be entitled to the time and attention of another person whose time and attention is precious? Why does what I have to say matter? Is this helpful? Is this useful? Is this stupid? Am I full of shit? 

No matter how smart somebody is and how much they’ve lived, they are limited. Great writers write around the in gap between them and the whole of the human experience with the confidence of mountain goats leaping between precariously small cliffside ledges. The contemporary writers whose work I find most enjoyable to read write with swagger, even and sometimes especially when they’re working with rather than against their limits– The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse, essayist Samantha Irby, novelist Colson Whitehead, journalists Jane Mayer and Rebecca Traister, screenwriters Mike White and Jesse Armstrong, public intellectuals Rebecca Solnit and Olga Tokarczuk. Of course, these people are the gold standard and I entertain no notions that what I’m doing when I write about how my toddler has learned to be mean is nearly as important as what, say, Jane Mayer is doing. But just as infielders need to know how to throw the ball to first base, writers— including me– need to push past the knowledge that there are myriad ways that each of us have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about and just write. 

Writing is a declarative act: this is who I am. This is what I have to say. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. I’m a writer. 

I can’t entirely blame becoming a parent for what I’m experiencing, but it is the start and end of my crisis of confidence.

Motherhood has been the most humbling experience of my life. No inbox full of misspelled hate mail about my bad opinions and bad face, no unexpected breakup, no loss of friendship or death in the family has come close to the way that raising a child has kneecapped my self-confidence, confidence that I needed to write anything down and not immediately feel humiliated. 

A part of motherhood that isn’t often discussed is the mourning. Becoming a mother closed the door on the unexplored possibilities of a life without children, a life I moved through with confidence and excitement; it opened a door on the possibilities of life with a child, a life punctuated with uncertainty and guilt.

Every day, after I wake up and my dreams dissipate, my first conscious thought is about my kid– I don’t know what I’m doing, nothing is within my control, and that yet, somehow, everything bad that happens is also my fault. She’s been whiny lately, and I feel in my bones it’s because of something I did and not what I know in my brain is a normal developmental phase. She’s been sick a lot lately, and I feel as though it must be because I finally stopped breastfeeding because I had gotten to the point where she was biting me and I hated it and not because her immune system is meeting all of these toddler germs for the very first time. She clings to me in public; I worry that this is because of something I did. It’s irrational, but I can’t quiet the guilt down. 

Therapy, theoretically, should help with some of these issues, but it turns out I’m bad at therapy. I have a difficult time being honest with therapists because I believe I will disappoint them if I’m not improving week by week, and so I lie and say things are great when they’re actually not great. I want them to believe that I’m getting better because I don’t want to let them down. This is something, ideally, that I’d work on in therapy if not for my Catch-22 relationship with authority, achievement, and whether approval and by extension love is given or paid. 

There was so much I didn’t know before having a kid. There’s so much I’ll never know, unknown-unknowns. It’s embarrassing. I read things I wrote more than five years ago and I’m shocked by my own confidence, my own ignorance. I yearn for the comparatively unencumbered life I had before I became a parent; I love my daughter more than anything in the world and can’t imagine my life without her. I am pulled in two directions. I am pulled apart. It’s hard to write in two pieces. 

I’m under no illusions that my problem is in universal. Most people seem to be handling parenthood better than I am (my guilt says that this is probably my fault). I’m a writer who is struggling to write, and I owe those who read my words an explanation. 

Who knows if the next time I sit down in front of a blank page I’ll feel my brain freeze up and my face and neck flush with shame, or if brain will go on an ugly little tirade about how whatever I think I have to say isn’t worth saying, much less writing down.

But I’m heartened by the fact that I’ve written this many paragraphs— even though the exercise of writing through it felt like passing a kidney stone through my brain— and I’m heartened by a line in Amelia Rayno’s piece about Chuck Knoblauch’s stashed away Golden Glove and Rookie of the Year trophies: The boxes are there. All you have to do is open them.