I Wrote an Article That Ended a Friendship and Also, Good Riddance
By: Elisabeth Ovesen
Tags: Life Lessons, Relationships, This Happened To Me, Mental Health, Writing

WRITING & RELATIONSHIPS

I Wrote an Article That Ended a Friendship and Also, Good Riddance

How my triumphant return to writing and one well-meant article became the straw that broke a friendship’s back.

Illustration: Aew/Raw Pixel

As the story goes, I retired from writing in 2015 after the conclusion of the tour for my fifth book. After three New York Times bestsellers, years of press engagements, and interviews with nearly every highly sought-after outlet in the world, including the Oprah Winfrey Show with its infamous “Oprah Effect,” I was spent. Somewhere along the way, I lost my love of writing and became disenfranchised from the publishing industry as a whole. I’d been mistreated by editors at top houses who strong-armed me into writing about events and people I didn’t wish to and refused to allow me to grow as an artist as I grew and aged as a woman, insisting I continue to write the same sort of material in my later thirties as I wrote in my mid-twenties.

I felt there was no place for me in publishing as it leaned strongly toward celebrity-driven content and social media shenanigans to inform which books would be published. I was done being “famous,” and instead, longed to focus on healthy lifestyle and wellness content, which wasn’t en vogue at the time. So, I just quit, or rather, I retired and focused on The Gorgeous Girl’s Guide –– a company and brand I founded back in 2013.

Put Me back in the Game, Coach!

Five years after leaving the industry, my friend Jermaine Hall, the Editor-in-Chief at LEVEL, a Medium publication, gave me a shot at writing my first article for them, entitled, Are You Married to Your Mother. It took me over a week to trust my voice and bang out an article of which I could be proud and one worthy of LEVEL’s standards. This was a task that should have taken maybe a full workday, but I was rusty, and I was broken.

This year had been difficult for me, as it has been for us all. I lost a lot early in 2020 and was still reeling. I was unsure of myself and my ability to keep breathing, much less writing anything substantial for the first time in five years. But, Jermaine believed in me. He’d seen me at my best over the past fifteen years of my career and knew I could be “her” once more. So, with Aliya King as my editor, I struggled through several drafts of what eventually became my reentry into the literary atmosphere.

That was in late July.

In August, as I waited for the final draft of the LEVEL article to be published, I began writing new pieces while bringing over most of the posts I'd written for The Gorgeous Girl’s Guide over the years and making our blogs into a publication here on Medium. I was feeling good about myself and my ability to write for the first time in years. This was my lifeblood, the thing I’d done almost every day since I was five years old, but had given up thirty years later. Sure, I was banging out articles for The Gorgeous Girl’s Guide, but I was phoning them in, feeling strained and belabored with each post. I wasn’t feeling inspired, and words no longer flowed from my brain to my fingertips like so many rivers writers mention when waxing poetic. Writing was never just something I did; it was and is a large part of who I am, and without it, I’d been lost.