The Olympics were held in Paris in August of this year. If you, like me, are obsessed with athletics – the category of track and field sports – then the way the Olympics played out may have come as a minor shock. I tuned in ready to watch several greats put their all into their sport and garner glory. I wanted to see if Yulimar Rojas would beat her world record in triple jump or if Shericka Jackson would finally manage to dislodge Flo-Jo’s record in the 100 or 200m race, for example. However, neither of those women competed in this year’s Olympics. Yulimar Rojas had announced earlier in the year that she would not participate due to injuries. Shericka Jackson was slated to participate, but she pulled out of the 100m and 4x100m events to focus on the 200m. She ended up pulling out of that as well when the time came.

Athletes missing out on meets due to injury is sad albeit not new. Yulimar Rojas released a statement before the Olympics that she had injured her Achilles tendon while training. Watching the triple jump event, I felt her absence. How sad was it that she’d missed out on participating in the biggest athletic event in the world. I could not help but think of my absence from the page.

August was the final month of the three-month fellowship. A month where I was at the peak of a writing slump, where I had to reckon with the fact that I had not written as much as I thought I would during the fellowship. I felt like a failure. Here I was being offered the support I had dreamed of and faltering. I had spent the first months of 2024 applying and submitting to everything in sight and writing like a banshee was on my trail. After being hit with rejection after rejection (I was waking up to them every day. I was literally being served rejection for breakfast!) my gears grinded to a halt. It was in the midst of this slump that I was accepted to the fellowship. I wrote and it was more painful than pulling teeth sans anesthetic. I was having problems with my project. I wasn’t sure where it was going or if it even wanted to go anywhere. 

In Yulimar Rojas statement she said, ‘… the desire to defend my Olympic title excited me enormously but today I have to stop, understand this, recover and come back with great strength to continue flying together. See you soon with the same dreams and desire.”

I read those words in early August and decided to do just that. Stop trying to push through with grit teeth and start trying to understand the root causes of the stall. Use that understanding to work at recovering. Come back with strength and vigor that I could pour into my project. 

I let go of feelings of failure. Because when I looked at Yulimar Rojas and Shericka Jackson, I did not see failures. I saw strong women who had given all they had and still had come up against an undesirable outcome. Injury, fatigue, their bodies demanding rest and recuperation. Just as mine was. Sometimes, self-compassion is easier when we imagine inflicting the same treatment we have given ourselves on others. 

I set down my pen and stopped being powered by my anxiety to create-or-else. I read for pleasure. I engaged with other writers. I dove into researching things that intrigued me, following threads that danced at the periphery of my vision when I struggled bullishly with my project. Slowly, I began to probe into the darkness. My mind flooded with ideas and I let them marinate. Unwilling to spook them or wrangle them into solidity before they were ready. I let myself be a conduit for ideas. 

Then, during the last meeting of the fellowship I was struck by an idea that seemed to present solutions to the issues I was facing with my project. But what came seemed large and unwieldy requiring a lot more work than its previous iteration. During the final meeting, I asked Suyi a question about choosing what to write as a first book, an easy idea, or one that was more complex. His answer gave me perspective, cleared my fear, and made me feel as though I could do it. 

After the end of the fellowship, I am lifting myself out of the creative morass I was stuck in. I am finally ready to return to my project with the same dreams and desire. 

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