I recently sat down with Claudia Scheidemann and Michaela Muschitz for their German podcast "Tinte und Courage" (Ink and Courage) — a conversation about writing as a tool for clarity and courage. We ended up going much deeper than I expected.
The podcast is in German, so I wanted to share some of the ideas here for those who don't speak the language. Not a summary of the episode — more like the thoughts that kept circling in my head after we stopped recording.
Five sentences. That was all I could manage.
In May 2025, I had a severe stroke. Both sides of my cerebellum. The part of the brain that handles concentration, language, vision, balance, coordination.
Before the stroke, I could shape sentences while writing them. Feel their rhythm, decide where to end them, stretch or compress them. Suddenly, that was gone. I could only write word by word. Verbs disappeared. Commas showed up where they didn't belong. For someone who writes books for a living, that was devastating twice over.
So I built myself a writing rehab programme. I fed four chapters of my fantasy novel into an AI, told it how I used to write, named the authors whose styles I admired and why, and asked it to generate daily writing prompts tailored to my story. Five sentences a day. Five minutes.
"Describe light as taste in your fantasy world."
That was the assignment. Nothing more.
I did this for two or three months. Every day. And every day I fed what I'd written back into the AI for feedback. Where can I improve? What's still missing? The whole cycle took maybe ten minutes.
Something unexpected happened. I didn't just get back to where I was. I got better. Because the limitation forced me to look at old habits I'd never questioned. The stroke stripped my writing down to nothing, and when I rebuilt it, I left the weak parts behind.
The moment I knew I was truly back was when I picked up my fabtasy draft notebook instead of a sheet of paper and started writing my fantasy novel by hand again. Full sentences. Rhythm. Flow. Seven notebooks and counting.
The Dirty Sketchbook
The same thing happened with drawing and painting.
After the stroke, I couldn't look at screens. I had double vision and had to wear an eye patch. For a visual thinker and designer — someone whose entire existence is built on seeing — that was existential.
So I asked the AI a simple question: What drawing exercises can I do when I can barely draw?
The answer was embarrassingly obvious. Straight lines. Divide the page. Diagonal lines. Curved lines. Just go back to the basics.
I drew lines for weeks. Straight ones, curved ones, diagonal ones, patterns. Nothing impressive. But my brain was quietly relearning how things work.
When I came home from rehab, I started what I call the Dirty Sketchbook. A small sketchbook. Acrylics. Drop painting. Abstract mess. Five to ten minutes a day.
It's not art in any ambitious sense. But it's my guaranteed creative time. And I've realised that most people don't even have that anymore. Not because they don't have five minutes — everyone has five minutes. But because they've stopped believing five minutes could matter.
It matters. Those five minutes are the win of the day.
The Question That Changes Everything
I was 45, fit, hadn't drunk alcohol in 25 years, didn't smoked, ate organic, barely touched sugar, drank decaf. And I had a stroke while playing basketball.
That taught me something no amount of planning ever could: you might not get a tomorrow.
So the question isn't "What will I do when I retire?" or "What will I change next year?" The question is: Would I want to have lived the way I'm living right now?
During the nine months I couldn't work, nothing in the business world collapsed. My clients were fine. Nobody was angry. The world kept turning.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: Why do we treat every email like an emergency? Why do we perform urgency all day long for things that, in the end, didn't need us at all?
Process Over Outcome
Before the stroke, I had several projects in progress that might never have been finished. And if I'd measured my life by whether they got done, I would have missed the point entirely.
The process is the thing. Not the finished book. Not the polished illustration. The act of sitting down, picking up the pen, making five marks on a page. That's where the life is.
The Japanese have a word for this sensibility — an appreciation for imperfection, for things made by hand, for the beauty in what's unfinished. I've had to learn this the hard way. My drawing style used to be clean and precise. Now it's less controlled. And I've had to accept that the wobble is part of it.
It took pressure off. When you truly accept that what you're making doesn't have to be perfect — that the point is the making, not the made — something shifts.
And Yet
My motto these days is a single word: And Yet.
Scarred brain — think clearly anyway. Only thirty minutes of focus — and yet write books. Deep exhaustion — and yet find joy.
There are still dark days. Days where I think it'll never come back. Days where I lie in bed for ninety minutes after fifteen minutes of work. Days the world doesn't see.
But as long as I keep showing up — five minutes, five sentences, five brushstrokes — it moves forward. Always a little further.
Sometimes "and yet" is the most powerful word you have.
The full conversation (in German) is on the "Tinte und Courage" podcast: https://tinte-und-courage.ink/s03-06-holger-nils-pohl-die-kraft-des-trotzdem/ Claudia and Michaela are doing beautiful work exploring writing as a practice for clarity and courage — worth following if you speak German.