Beyond the Page
A Hard Look at Compulsion, Embodied Presence, and the Loop of Language
I took a break.
From writing.
From reading.
From Substack.
From scrolling and involving in social media.
That slowly built up over the last weeks and months, when reconnecting and immersing myself more into the nervous system realm, while outside everything got louder, more intense, more performative, more cruel, more dramatic.
I lightly followed the Epstein files or rather the reactions to them, followed- or was forced to recognise- Trump’s frantic behaviour, reading about outrage, overwhelm, spirituality and its bypassing, patriarchy, matriarchy, psychological flooding, exhaustion - until the point I felt entirely drained.
I too felt drained by my inbox, presenting as frantic, often daily - or even several-times-a-day - newsletters of fellow Substack writers who to big extend write extraordinarily beautiful. But I simply could not get anything in anymore. Storage full.
Too I felt drained by the sense that I need to keep that pace of posting, of being visible, of relating to the world.
The permanent involvement, the self-optimisation that seems to be required, the constant “showing up,” the relentless input and output machinery - it has a cost.
It is participation in a drama, in alarming emergencies, in that relentless “upwards” or “ascending” or “more” trend… that drains.
The world and its people.
A constant enhancement, acceleration without re-connection. Tempo instead of embodied depth.
The wish to belong, to understand, to process like a machine - instead of embodied, ordinary being, including boredom and facing pain directly and returning to one’s centre or even failing at it. To recover one’s immediate awareness.
The global happenings, and I do not exclude substack now even if it is very often well thought, deeply researched, brilliant or with best intention, seem to be like a family chat where everybody speaks at the same time, barely anyone listens. Not to another, not to oneself. And even if enriching conversations developed, Gems, there is a limit. And there is: No. Fucking. Pause.
Words are tumbling over each other, the tone escalates or simply gets more intense and dense. More refined. More…Happenings or anything are analysed to the point of paralysis. A lot of opinion, reflection, words, not much space.
There are persons who currently dominate and trouble world affairs with erratic, impulsive, daily action with immense consequence on any realm, it more generally seems that loudness is equated with power. Pressure, visibility and productivity are confused with presence. Control (and if it is just that “Checking in…”) is mistaken for clarity.
Everywhere we accelerate, turning up the volume (the word bombardement comes to mind):
Customs
Threats
Emotions
Posts
Notes
Reading
Writing
We do not drive- we are driven.
Or we retreat entirely, or move numb like robots through daily life, exhausted to the bones, maybe not even understanding exactly why.
Maybe this isn’t just politics or opinion or writing and reading.
Maybe it is like a collective nervous system that has gone entirely out of balance.
Several days after I decided on a “hygiene period” in regard to Substack and any other social media platform, I was driving from my current home village in Styria to the suburbs of Vienna to spend time with my family.
In this monotonous driving, my mind started to produce thoughts in regard to writing. It was the first time after a week that I thought of - and then about - writing.
I realised that I didn’t miss it.
Which should be a disaster for somebody who writes, but it did not feel like one at all.
When deciding to quit for a while - to die digitally, one could say, to die as somebody who writes and reads - I expected to have some sort of withdrawal symptoms. The impulse to check. The impulse to write. The impulse to read. The impulse to react.
Surprisingly, there was none.
It was more like a quiet sigh…an exhale.
And from that, instead, I recovered daily practice - physical, energetic - for myself.
I returned to my body. I returned to regular movement additionally to the daily walks with Ben.
I returned to yoga classes of a friend, which are subtle but more challenging than what I had been practising or forwarding lately, as well as to a leg-strengthening, thus grounding, practice combined with Qi Gong from a Shaolin master, Shi Heng Yi, whom I initially discovered during the pandemic.
That included- and includes- burning and trembling muscles. Including the breath and heartrate becoming quicker and softening into ease again. Experiencing Regulation in Real-Time. Including the ever happening interplay between contraction and expansion. Opening and closing. Ebb and flow. In and out. All of that happening, as a harmony in itself which does not need any witness. Which is significant and complete in itself and its aliveness.
It is a major difference whether one is teaching classes to others - where the focus is naturally on the students - or whether someone focuses completely on oneself and practises just for oneself.
For a long time I did the former, but barely the latter.
And instead of being present here or elsewhere digitally, instead of spending hours reading and writing, I started to cultivate a daily, highly physical practice again, interspersed with days of rest and only little in-between exercises.
The result?
More energy.
Less depletion.
More clarity.
Less overwhelm.
More presence and “in-tuneness.”
Less fragmentation.
And in this drive, I started to ask myself:
Besides all the often discussed and celebrated positive effects or aspects or impacts of writing (and reading) - of belonging, of expressing in this form - do we ever dare to honestly look at the negative ones?
I have to note here that I am not a writer who writes for a living. Too I am not homebound due to chronic and severe physical illness. This may be the exception - but maybe even then it is worth continuing to read, because after all, all of us are human, a highly intelligent organism of hopefully dancing cells, before any role, writing our soul or profession.
So let me ask you this uncomfortable question, gently and with genuine curiosity:
What if writing your ass off is, at times, avoidance?
Escape?
If yes - from what?
It is well known that writing can have totally positive effects. It often has functions or serves as a catalyst. Sometimes it may feel like a needed exhale. As I reflected myself in Rebelleheart, for example:
“Sometimes I write because I feel like I’m going to explode from all the input or emotion, or even joy.
Sometimes I write because my soul seems to bleed.
Sometimes I write because it makes me feel close to you.
Sometimes I write because it’s the amplification of everything I am capable of experiencing.
Sometimes I write without any real sense.
I love writing, no matter if it’s good or bad - God’s sake, I just love it because it gives me a place to be continuously uncensored, naked, and exposed to myself.
It’s everything I am, bursting out onto the pages, to you, to me, and sometimes I’m struck with wonder at its infinity and intensity, as I’m struck with wonder at being with you the way we are. Writing - I do it because it’s somehow a constant remembering, the universe speaking through my hands and heart, seeing the wonder of the world in my version of living and loving.”
There may be many more ways how we experience writing and reasons why we experience it as something purely positive. Each one of us will find those positive, helpful aspects I guess.
But these last weeks challenged that “only light” attitude towards writing and reading.
In hindsight, I can clearly say that - despite the insights and relief it gave me, the feeling of connection to another - my maniacal writing was also an escape. A bypass.
An escape from holding my inner movements without flinching.
From experiencing, in an embodied, direct way, all that felt uncomfortable or unbearable.
The pain.
The boredom.
The grief.
The uncertainty.
All the uncomfortability life holds- to hold it too. Without understanding it. Without explaining it. Without reflecting on it on my own or with others. Just holding it. Moving with it.
Without realising it at that time where Rebelleheart was written, I also tried to flee with my mind from my body.
To ascend into cunning reflections, sharp dissection, into mental understanding - I even wrote about not understanding, because I did not want to feel. Fully. Completely. Embodied. And without distraction or further expression, reflection or explanation.
With writing, I tried - at least at times- to process myself out of being.
To soften the edges.
To distract from felt sense because I trusted the mind more to hold it or do something with it than the pre-verbal vibrantly alive body itself.
To - maybe - make it at least a tangible creation, even when everything felt senseless and overwhelming.
If not a creation for the world, then at least for the one person I was writing to.
My writing became a confirmation that I exist. That there is a significance. That I needed an external witness for that confirmation. That I alone, in my embodied being, was not enough.
I did not want to fully embody experience.
The uncomfortable one. The complete, at times ugly, terrifying, “I want to get out of here” present moment. Or even the most joyous moment. There was an urge to share, which is human and wonderful, but now I ask myself if it isn’t at the same time mistrust in our embodied beings capacity to hold intense experience, as if we (our mind) suspect that the container is too small, too weak or not enough?
I too ignored the nervous system that was already screaming - if not through outrage, then through exhaustion.
Ignored the boundaries that were aching, because with my writing I stretched them, at times to an unhealthy extent.
I did respect myself.
I did discover.
I did explore.
But I was ascending. Or trying to. Maybe to get rid off that feelings I wrote and reflected about, if I’d been honest…
Instead of stopping and descending.
Slower.
Down.
Into the pre-verbal realm.
Into the body.
Into shadow and depth and just being there. With it. With me.
Into moving with it without witness, without audience, without productivity in terms of any outcome or revelation that is visible to others. That impresses others. That tells others I am functioning, or that I matter, that I am useful or that I even are. That transmits something. That helps others. That provokes deeper thought. That connects.
Writing can be a bridge into experience as well as to one another -
but it can also become a substitute for it.
A way of circling around what is felt, instead of entering it.
I deeply understand all those human notions, but I feel it is worth looking directly at why we truly - and maybe only at times - do something.
And that includes writing.
Especially if it becomes compulsive.
Especially if we feel as if we cannot live without it.
Not for financial reasons (meaning, you need it for making a living) - but for any other.
When it no longer nourishes, but keeps a loop spiraling without closing.
A loop in which the mind refines, sharpens, articulates - but the body remains untouched.
Where insight deepens maybe even constantly, but integration does not happen.
Where language expands, but the nervous system stays in isolation.
Where you are still…driven.
There is a strange beauty in that -and also a quiet tragedy.
Many of the most remarkable writers and artists carried immense inner tension throughout their lives.
Franz Kafka - whose works often depicted existential dilemmas - wrote with piercing clarity, yet remained entangled in his own inner conflicts and his sense of physical inferiority and inadequacy.
Sylvia Plath gave language to depths and inner contradictions many cannot even face - and still was constantly struggling, unable to truly integrate them.
Virginia Woolf shaped entire worlds with her sensitivity, while being overwhelmed by the intensity of her own.
Of course, this is a hypothesis - or my interpretation based on limited research. It is not a “knowing,” as I was clearly not inside them, and I have certainly not read all of their work, sometimes even just one or the other essay available online. But what I want to emphasise is that many well-known writers were deeply tortured by themselves or by conditions which today might be described as bipolar disorder, depression, or unresolved trauma.
It is often said that literature serves as therapy: that writing acts as a crucial outlet for processing inner turmoil and childhood wounds, allowing one to transform personal pain into artistic expression.
The problem I see - and those artists may be a perfect example - is that true transformation only happens when the body and the nervous system are addressed. When there is right-brain immersion. When we dare to descend into the somatic forest with curiosity, sensuality and sensitivity. When, instead of only activating and feeding - whether fast food or haute cuisine - the mind, we begin to nourish and move the body, which is what it is designed for.
Writing - which is a result of the acquisition of language and often fully develops after original wounds have occurred - may have brought, and may still bring, regular short-term relief. But did it ever truly connect to the base?
What is obvious is that suffering can be a powerful motor for, at times, brilliant, courageous, extraordinary expression.
Yet - it is optional.
Writing - or their writing - did not, and does not, resolve suffering.
It revealed it.
It gave it form.
Sometimes immense beauty.
But it did not necessarily lead to change.
It did not necessarily enhance the capacity to hold contradiction, friction, and polarity in one’s own body - in daily, ordinary, often utterly unspectacular life.
It did not necessarily mean peace in one’s being.
And at that point, I ask myself:
When pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional - what role does writing play in that? What role does the mind play? And what role does the body play?
So the question remains - not as judgment, but as inquiry:
To move into the body, to shift attention, and then to ask:
To what extent is it- writing, expressing, creation- healthy, and when does it become frantic, addictive or internally separating?
And if we realise that, to ask ourselves:
What do we want to flee from?
What do we want to distract from?
What do we want to compensate?
What do we not want to feel, meet - or be - at all costs?
Those are questions that surely do not have a rigid answer or conclusion, it is rather questions to be allowed into the body, maybe moved around in or after the next physical practice, the next more intense walk, when mind and body are one, for an individual answer to arise by itself. Or later, or not…
To finish, at least for myself and for today:
Maybe, sometimes and for a while, the most courageous and healthy thing a writer can do…
is not write.
Love
Karin
(with light muscle ache and a comatose sleepy dog next to me.)