My Cold is a Brutal Editor

Bed-Ridden, Year-End, Under the Weather Reflections on Future Goals & Vision, the Editing of Narratives & the Unexpected Insights about Writing and Relationships

A Perilous Decision

Snow dusted the shoulders of the mountains recently, marking for many in my community that winter had arrived. But I already knew it was here. For me, earlier in the week, a seasonal cold indicated the shift from Fall to Winter as it nipped the base of my throat, yet never quite taking hold. I had made a perilous decision with myself not to get sick.

For the past few days, I would sneak out of the house early, before dawn, before a cough would stir and get anyone up. I would take several tablets of vitamin C throughout the day without regard to the recommended daily intake. I would take time to catch up on sleep while travelling on a bus to work. And then at work, I’d settle into my office and focus on the year-end wrap-up retrospective activities and start reflecting on our 2025 strategic plans for our group. Reflection became a theme for me, and it continued into late evenings where I made some space for myself to attend my own personal year-end assessments. I started to plan for 2025, aiming to develop a vision of what the following year would be like.

At first, I found the act of looking forward to the new year as daunting. I feared it. I didn’t feel optimistic. It had been only a few months that my partner declared she wanted to leave me. As someone who loves his family, this admission was devastating, confirming that our relationship had frozen over for months.

And yet this choice to schedule time at the end of the day to eke out a vision statement for myself was uncharted, verging into territory of selfishness. The craft seemed to leave me, and the words didn’t come. So I sat there during those evenings, awake, unable to sleep, feeling empty and drained.

That’s when the cold took me.

Dealings with the Fourth Horseman and his White Ponies, Focus & Priority

I felt useless. I felt even worse knowing I was going to be more of a burden to my partner than usual. The kids had already navigated their brief, brief journeys through illness earlier in the week, and now it was my turn. My body, exhausted, forced me to reconsider where and when I took space and time. And this cold was going to put me on my back regardless of what I declared and set on my personal agenda. Gah.

When you are feeling sick, most would agree that it is at best an “unpleasant” condition. Considering normal symptoms of the common cold or flu, being ill had never led me to face the dreaded Fourth Horseman on his pale nightmare, Plague, who together would usher in the Apocalypse.

Instead, most colds felt like I had ‘‘neighbourly dealings’ or a minor incursion with a restrained version of this horseman. It was like I was a landowner on his acreage voicing a disagreement with a gentleman cowboy who led his prize winning white ponies, named Focus and Priority, down the mountain to visit and graze on my front lawn. Despite my best protestations regarding the grand inconvenience this visitation brought me, in the decorum of North American Western Prairie Hospitality, I’d only get a wordless slow conciliatory tip of the hat from this uncommon cowboy, conveying the silent and regrettable declaration, “Don’t worry, son. We’ll be here for a week or two. And then we’ll be on our way.”

And so with Focus and Priority, their leads close and tight around my achy being, my body would shut down. My head pounded as my sinuses filled with gunk. I could barely speak, and my energy would wick away. Everything would hurt. I even developed a mysterious limp, an old injury that clutched painfully to my left ankle.

So I took some medicine. I set myself up on the couch. I made tea. I got cozy. I put a fire on. I made a fizzy drink full of Vitamin C and elderberry syrup. I had my computer nearby. But I couldn’t bear to open it since my headache would throb in time with the blinking cursor.

Just before I succumbed to the ravages of my cold, I wrote a draft of my vision. In fact, I didn’t write anything, but instead I drew it. I used a drawing app on my phone to illustrate what I would dream for myself in 2025. Drawing felt better at that moment since I felt I couldn’t put words together with precision and competency.

Hours later, I was able to add some text.

In my mind, although it wasn’t my best work, these words did act as a placeholder for a feeling, an aspiration – that could only be unlocked and be available only to me. So I published the drawing with its accompanying descriptions to my writing group.

And then I went down for the count.

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My Cold is a Brutal Editor

All good writers write [shitty first drafts]. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.¹

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (1995).

Editing and revision are essential activities for any creative endeavour. Many writers understand that the ideas they render first into text will distill and concentrate further into clarity under revision. At every pass, at every supportive suggestion or recommendation from a benevolent editor, at every choice to cut or expand a passage, the text develops into something that one hopes to be a little more refined and meaningful for readers. Indeed, editors and their feedback can offer a threshold for writers to pass through and connect with their audience.

So it surprised me when my cold disrupted my attempts to express myself. Its capacity to deplete and render me into a blubbering sneezing mess was instantaneous and unpredictable. As I attempted to write, I realized that my cold emerged as a brutal yet effective editor of ideas.

You see, when I’ve been stuck in developing a piece of writing, I found that my editors often helped me through various creative blocks I encountered. Sometimes they would illuminate a new way to reframe the piece over several cycles of mutual discussion and feedback. Other times they would ask for clarity leading to more refinements on various sections of the text. This relationship with my editors would be iterative and inherently cooperative, all with the aim to produce better versions of my work with each round of edits and revision. However, this viral editor - this cold -showed no gentle approach. It offered no direct inspiration. It suggested no easy cadence for development of ideas. The feedback was distinctly somatic, authoritarian and resolute.

For instance, when people from my writing group found my personal aesthetic on “Authorship” to be intriguing, they asked me to write more about it. So I started with a vague one-sentence reply:

“Authorship guides my commitment as a writer”.

But my cold was having none of that nonsense.

Instead, it conjured a mental fog, obscuring my sense of where this idea was headed. I would come back to this same formation, the same set of ideas over and over without any sense of progress or new direction. My internal sense-making compass was spinning.

The fog had won, and I needed to stop.

It became clear to me that this paper-thin imprecisely folded origami boat of ideas wasn’t resilient enough to make a crossing to the sacred Isles of Meaning. No, my viral editor was Poseidon, condemning me to meander on this Ocean of Vagueness, threatening to obfuscate my way home forever unless I made the requisite offering. So I sacrificed this anemic one-liner and cut it out of my reply.

I tried again. This time I would start at the conceptual bottom and build an intellectual foundation for my ideas on Authorship to germinate and grow from. I started to write full expositions in my notebook, throwing in additional ideas like authenticity, ownership and a connection with others to help bind this axiomatic matrix.

But my cold only saw these attempts, these flowering ideas, as weeds, and suggested that I rip them all out and turn them into more compost and bullshit. So I began to focus on the details and minutiae of this framework, adding more foundational layers of abstraction with every mental churn. My body responded, aching over the philosophical heaviness of the piece and then yielding into sleep.

My cold presided over this moratorium on my personal creative expression. And it was irritating! I believed my ideas about ‘Authorship’ held an indomitable sense for resolution that could be realized at an instance, if only I could scratch it. But I couldn’t scratch. I could only watch it in my mind’s eye. I was a dog reviving from the swoon of anesthetic at the vet office, only to rediscover a distant memory, a betrayal from my owner breaking our eternal & sacred bonds as pack members for some mysterious surgery and then concluding the experience with an all too present shame in the form of a plastic cone fastened to the collar to keep me from chewing off my stitches.

The Wisdom of a Common Cold

My cold slowed me down, both in body and in mind. But the inertia it brought had wisdom too. It prioritized rest over revision, recovery over resilience, and release over resistance.

Since physical and mental energy was scarce and fleeting at the height of my symptoms, my cold appeared to create an editorial filter that brought focus on what I truly wanted to say before I committed it in writing. Topics could only be considered if they inherently triggered some genuine excitement for me. If these ideas didn’t meet or peak beyond my threshold of interest, I had to discard them. I had no energy to attend to anything else.

Also, because all nascent ideas begin as delicate and ephemeral mental objects, my cold taught me that I couldn't hold onto any one idea for too long before tiredness and sleep would overwhelm me. It would be better for me to release the idea into the firmament of my mind with the hope that it would bloom again later than to wrestle it into some turgid expression of the moment. My cold demanded that my development of ideas align with the pacing of my own convalescence and recovery.

The fact was my cold was in-charge. Any hubris that I could outmaneuver or outthink these symptoms through sheer willpower and shining intent was lost to waves of fever and congestion. My cold’s dominance over my writing schedule was absolute and disregarded any preconceived writing cadence I promised to myself to do. The experience humbled me. I had to accept that my circle of control was far more limited than I would care to admit to myself. The Stoic philosopher, Epictetus had some insight about this:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.²

Epictetus, The Enchiridion

This question of what was truly under my control continued to resonate as I got better. There would be moments where I would see my wife at the kitchen table reading, silent and distant. I’d feel guilty for the chasm that opened between us and my self-judgement would spin up again.

I was accountable as much for my inaction as I was accountable for my actions. I would list the things that I feel I had fell short. I didn’t embrace her enough. I missed or played down those fleeting chances to dance with her in the kitchen or just to have fun. I didn’t appreciate her in the manner she needed…

I would continue the cycle of rumination until I convinced myself that I possessed some irredeemable quality, some deep incompetence or trauma, that impaired my ability to nurture a sacred intimacy with her. The rumination would congeal into a sticky narrative that I was to blame for the lack of joy she experienced.

So then I would sit across from her at the kitchen table as she continued to read her book. (Maybe she was just reading a book?) Yet, at that moment, I could almost feel the air, thick and inert between us. I couldn’t feel the wisdom from my cold. I couldn’t hold the guidance from Epictetus. There was only me. And I was a character dropping into a familiar narrative of isolation and panic, struggling and then finding and then launching a word or a phrase towards her, a desperate signal to make a sincere connection. But nothing substantive, not even an affirming glance, would be exchanged, only single words: yes, no, and various short transactional responses to get through the day. My narrative would freeze solid as the snow fell silently outside.

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The Benevolence of an Editor

Later, I realized that the wisdom of my cold and the insights of Epicteus had more to teach me. My stories about myself and about my relationships could still and should be subject to the question of what was actually under my control: Was it really true that I triggered Joy or Joylessness in my partner? Perhaps I could influence it, but did I actually have a secret power that would induce this personal experience at will?

In fact, self-narratives were just stories, eligible for editing and revision.

The wisdom of both my viral editor and Epictetus pointed to new questions regarding my narrative: What if her feelings and capacity to feel joy had nothing to do with me? What if I’m not as important to her as I would like to believe? What if she is walking through a new phase, something independent of me and our relationship? Could this be a natural evolution or are these changes induced from actions from her as an empowered individual?

But the best question came to me like this:

What would my narrative look like if I released this claim that I was responsible for the amount of joy my partner would experience in her life?

Yes, the bond with her is real, and yes, it hurts when it breaks.

But I could see this question, this final benevolence from my viral editor, as a spark, inviting a brand new revision to my narrative. Certainly, it would be a lot of work. And yes, there would be therapy. And a lot of writing too, at least for me. It would involve many rewrites and revisions, working through tangled thoughts, feelings and judgments. I can imagine there will be many parts in my narrative that would need to be reframed, edited or even dropped to make space for other more useful things that should be expanded and expressed more fully. And yet, as daunting as this work appeared to me, it felt right… and warm.

Winter had come, but I could already feel the thaw underway.

Special thanks to my human editors who helped me with their invaluable and generous feedback and encouragement: Tahsin Khan (Tahsin Khan), Harrison Moore (the New Workday), Rick Lewis (Honestly Human), Emily Felt (Emily Brooke), Simon Emslie (The Pipe Writer), Larry Urish, and Matt B. Also hats off to all of my online crew whom I connected with this month (Rob, Linda, Claire, Chao, Alex - apologies if I if missed anyone.) - I appreciate all your thoughts and encouragement. Thank you. Onward!

1. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1995.

2. Epictetus, The Enchiridion, (https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html).