Hey Reader,

There’s nothing like being in a flow state.

That place where ideas are coming non-stop. Where a flood of words are dancing at your fingertips. Where you look up at the clock and hours have passed without you realizing, you were so absorbed in your work.

It’s amazing.

I was there last July while I was writing the Path to Creativity essays — I woke up each morning excited to dictate-type-edit-flow, and I went to bed each night with new ideas bubbling in my mind.

One of those essays was about taking regular time to pause and reboot. And in fact, the intense flow state I experienced while writing that essay series had come as a direct result of pausing. I’d spent weeks reflecting and rethinking my business before deciding to re-launch a creative productivity newsletter.

(You know… The one you’re reading right now. :)

I poured everything I had into this new project, harnessing the joy and momentum of the flow state. And then, on July 15, a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting blinded my left eye and brought all that flow to a screeching halt.

As I write this, it’s been almost seven weeks since the shooting. Seven weeks since the mad dash to the hospital and the IV tubes and the eye surgeries and the interviews with detectives and news crews.

I’m still processing exactly how this has changed my life.

On the one hand, not very much. Loads of people have only one eye — I feel like I’ve been inducted into a secret society of monocular folks with weird senses of humor and lots of puns. As I recover I’ve found that I can still ride my bike. I can play games and read books. I’m hardly any clumsier than before — I was never the most graceful human.

On the other hand, a backfiring car or the sound of fireworks lights up my nervous system in panic for hours. I have nightmares. My imagination, which has always been overactive, runs wild with terrifying scenarios whenever I ride in a car or walk around my neighborhood.

And seven weeks of progress, plans, work, flow … all vanished in a flash.

There’s thoughtfully pressing pause to reflect, and then there’s having life press pause for you.

When you’re in change of the timing, you can clear your plate and tie up loose ends.

When life chooses the timing, your priorities get scattered to the wind.

And it can take a shockingly long time to pick up the pieces.

Years ago, I attended a week-long business master class with Kristine Katherine Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. They’re both been in the writing game for decades, and have a somewhat playful way of acknowledging that life sometimes get in the way.

They call these major life-altering events “life rolls.”

If you’ve ever played a roll-playing game, you know dice rolling is meant to emulate the random chance inherent in real life. Let’s say your character is trying to sneak past a guard to steal an artifact from a museum. The roll of the dice tells you if you’re successful or not.

In the game of a writer’s career, “life rolls” are the random chance events that take you away from your work, seemingly with the roll of a dice.

Some of those events are positive: you take a bucket-list trip, accept a promotion at your day job, have a baby.

Some of those events are negative: you become sick, have a death in the family, get shot in the eye.

Positive or negative, all are disruptive — and working your way through to the other side requires you to acknowledge that you’re in the middle of a life roll and give yourself grace.

As Kris wrote on her blog back in 2012:

“Life rolls knock all of us to our knees, whether the rolls come by telephone or via e-mail or by a simple knock on the door. We’ll all spend some time on that floor wondering how the hell we got there.

“The key is not that we’ve fallen, not even how long we remain on our knees with our hands hiding our faces, but how many times we’re willing to get up. Once we get up again, then we go forward in the new reality, forging a new path.”

I’ve spent the past seven weeks (and counting) reeling from this life roll.

Given my limited energy, I knew my biggest project was to rest and heal — despite my mounting panic that I was falling behind on the work that mattered most.

I had to trust that I’d get back to work when it was time, and that the world wouldn’t end because life pressed the pause button on me. Things that didn’t fall in the category of “rest and heal” have had to wait — including this newsletter.

But, as my friend Curtis Chen said when I was stressing about it, “No one ever complained about getting fewer emails.”

This week was my first “real” week of work (though I’ve still been taking plenty of naps), and most of my time has been spent trying to organize and prioritize rather than writing.

In fact, this essay is the first thing I’ve actually written in ages, and it’s been tough to remember how to pull words out of my brain and onto the paper.

As any writer can attest, rust collects quickly when you’ve been away from your writing practice, and I’m definitely feeling the creak and groan of those rusty writing gears today.

I’m lucky.

The bullet stopped in my eye instead of piercing my brain. I may need to relearn things like how to pour liquids with my new lack of depth perception, but I don’t need to relearn how to walk, or type.

Still.

Even seven weeks later I’m not at 100%, as badly as I want to be.

I need to acknowledge that I’m smack in the middle of a life roll, and “normal” is still a long ways away.

I have at least one more surgery ahead. I have multiple doctor visits per week, between the various eye specialists I’m seeing, the psychologist, and normal annual care (like a mammogram and dentist appointment) that I usually cram into the fall.

But, for the first time in seven weeks, I’m sitting at a coffee shop with my laptop and a delicious americano, writing. And that feels like a very big milestone indeed.

Whether you’re currently in a state of flow or trying to dig yourself out of a life roll, give yourself grace, friends.

Give yourself grace.

Remember that rest and flow are not opposites — they’re both natural, necessary phases we pass through during the cycle of creativity. Sometimes you choose when to rest; other times life chooses to press pause for you.

Giving yourself permission to acknowledge where you are is the first step to finding your way back to flow.

Be well,

Jessie