The Outsourced Writer

You've been letting something else write for you. Maybe just at first: the work emails that felt obligatory, the LinkedIn posts you didn't believe in, the apology message you didn't know how to phrase. Then the personal stuff, slowly. Texts to friends. The reply to your mother. A toast for someone's wedding.

It happens fast. The model's first drafts are competent. Yours are halting, by comparison. So you stop trying. You edit instead. Then you stop editing too, because what's there is fine.

The thing nobody warns you about is that a writing voice is a use-or-lose capacity. It doesn't live in your head. It lives in the muscle of choosing this word over that one, in the pause before you commit, in the particular way you ruin a metaphor. Without the work, the muscle goes.

The good news is the muscle comes back fast. A page by hand most mornings. The email you've been putting off, sent without help. A short letter to someone, just to remember how. Within a few weeks the cursor stops blinking back at you, and something that sounds like you starts arriving on the page again.