22 Apr 2025

Cold and empty

Talia Lavin on finding the words; Carrie Frye talks The Awl: The Book

Today: Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith.

Issue No. 304

A Frozen Sea of Words
Talia Lavin

The Awl: The Book: The Talk
Carrie Frye, Maria Bustillos and Joe MacLeod

A Frozen Sea of Words

by Talia Lavin

In Russian, writer’s block is known as “fear of the white page.” Or the white screen, in my case. When I sat down to write, my hands shook, in time with the blinking cursor. In the days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the sense of grief and futility I felt after having written two books and literally hundreds of pieces warning of the ascent of fascism, only to see fascism triumphantly crown itself with the gilded laurels of victory, made the gap between me and my words seem unbridgeable.

I wrote one piece after the election, but I took it down after it received some harsh, if ultimately deserved, backlash. I felt terribly vulnerable about writing for an audience all of a sudden, even though I’d been doing it for years, like a tightrope walker suddenly remembering how thin the wire is. I wobbled. Then the silence came.

Sure, I’d had a week or two of burnout before, here and there, or periods where the words came harder, more slogging than soaring. But I’d previously considered my words as analogous to, say, my blood, an integral part of me flowing within, something I could summon at any point with minimal effort. I took it for granted, until it was gone.

Fear of the white screen consumed me. As the gap grew wider and wider, I fell into a spiral of self-recrimination and shame, until a carapace of anxiety hardened all around me. I believed I would never get the words back. I watched my bank account dip lower, as people unsubscribed from my newsletter after weeks of drought; the anxiety heightened, but no matter how hard I strained, I could not write. In a capitalist society, your worth is tied so tightly to what you’re able to produce that I doubted the value of my own life. Failurefailurefailure was the inner thrum of my thoughts. I moved through the world sluggishly, a writer without words, feeling as useful as a cup without a bottom. I didn’t know what to do except thrash and flail in these putrid storm waters that sought to pull me under.