After a period of prolific creation where I was writing continuously, I've suddenly come to a standstill. But not in the normal way.
It's an active resistance. I feel it intensely, this block so strong it's a presence in my life. It sits on my chest like some kind of demon of ennui, daring me to pick up a pen or flip open my laptop. It's a tense knot of silly putty that's enmeshed in my lungs, weighing heavily on my sternum. It has been three months and I can't seem to free myself from it.
In Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, she tells the reader to show up to the page. "Just write," she says. I'm doing anything but. Laundry, editing, sending emails, organizing the junk drawer, making phone calls, liking a myriad of similar images on Pinterest. I've became restless and short-tempered. I read voraciously, which I tell myself is a related act, when for me in these moments it's really just an escape.
I would do anything, anything at all except write. If I manage to scrawl a few sentences I almost immediately scribble them out.
At the same time, all I want to do was write. Not for work or to help someone else, but for me. The pen hath mightier than the sword, and unfortunately I'm at war with myself over it.
I read somewhere that writing is an act of courage. I don't know if this is true, but I do know that the type of writing I do is deeply personal. It's usually nonfiction, or it's poetry, which for me is also a form of nonfiction. So maybe I did too much too fast and now I'm afraid of revealing myself more. Maybe I'm too scared of the process. I also have a tendency to overthink the pieces I've written, editing and rewriting until it no longer resembles what it once was. Sometimes, this is a good thing. What comes out is better and stronger than before.
But more often than not, it's a fruitless exercise. I lose the heart - that flash of truth or inspiration, that small gem of meaning - that made the piece what it was. Like many things in my life, this is a prime example of me not knowing when to stop.
That's why I'm writing this post today. I'm writing it, and I'm hitting publish. I'm not going back over it 1,000 times. I'm not going to try to build it into something I can submit somewhere. It's just a blog post that only a handful of people might read, and then forget about.
But that's not important. What matters is that I wrote something today. I wrote this. And now it exists out there in the world.
And that's something.
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