About writer’s block and other handicaps….

I like to talk and tell stories, to listen to other people tell stories and analyse their stories. I know people who think I am good with words. I am not actually good with words, I just find spoken English really boring so I try to spice when I type.

Yes. I put a lot of effort into my texting.

Sometimes, I find I have nothing to write. Not even in my private notebook. A couple of weeks ago my significant other, also a really brilliant blogger, mentioned that he has had writer’s block for a while because, and I paraphrase, he has not felt anything particularly inspiring. Today, I find myself empathising with him because I gave myself deadlines I have failed to meet.

This happens to me fairly often even with my music. I wake up in the morning, and can’t feel a song. My mentor gave me a task to write every day two years ago, he will be sad to know that I haven’t written in nearly two months. I have nothing to say. I feel stuff, but I can’t write about it.

I think expression is an elementary part of human nature. How I express myself goes to the core of who I am, woman, sister, lover, friend, person…I have to be able to speak and write and sing my heart and mind. Yesterday I was sad…so inexplicably sad, and in tears and emotional for most of the day…and I wanted to write a poem about it, bleed my feelings onto paper. I picked up my pretty journal and my black pen and….nothing….two hours later….nothing…so I recorded  a voice note and went to sleep instead….that is how I knew….no inspiration….

I miss being inspired…I miss waking up in the morning so inconceivably filled with joy and passion that there aren’t enough words for me to say how I feel…I miss going to bed at night so depressed or overwhelmed that I cannot get out of bed without writing a song about the depth of my melancholy. I look around at my life and it feels so excessively mundane, so empty of things that motivate me to keep going day by day…I am in love…I have a great family, I have wonderful friends and my career as I like to call it is about to jump off….but I am looking for something….something deeper, something more, something I cannot identify with words even though I want it so badly I can taste it like a nosebleed.

I am not crazy…I am just empty…and sometimes empty is good…because empty means I am ripe for filling….filling….with good or bad, happy or sad, love or hate, promise or disappointment, hope or despair….ripe for filling….and yet…why does it feel like the dry and empty moment when there is a pregnant anticipatory pause between the wind and the waters breaking into rain….this part…I hate this part….because in this part I have no control over any outcome…I have to wait like everybody else, walk quickly and hope that when the rain comes it waters my crops and does not leave me locked out, soaked and stranded, deafened by thunder and blinded by lightning and wondering how I gave up my umbrella….

I read this passage and realise that my frustration has cured me of my writer’s block….it’s never that serious anyway…nothing ever is…and the things that are I have come to find usually fix themselves…I will be just fine….19 more days….