Writer’s Block

When I started writing, it was less about making art with my feelings and more about letting them out so that they didn’t burst open inside me. I would let my passion squeeze out into words through my fingers and get a taste of what true achievement felt like. Whatever I felt, whenever I felt it, I would jot down, creating a chequebook of hopes, desires, dreams and everything connecting them. I would write something I was genuinely proud of and rejoice. I didn’t think it was possible to be unable to write because it was impossible for me to stop feeling. But I didn’t realise that sometimes feelings weren’t pliable enough to be formed into words, that just because there was ice on a mountain didn’t mean that it would melt into the river.

The first time I couldn’t write something that I knew I should be able to, I felt like how I imagine a half-broken tree must feel, how it still had all its parts, but it couldn’t do what it does. I sat in front of my diary with a pencil in my hand, playing catch with the letters that stubbornly refused to be welded into something I could hold. Eventually, I gave up, and the only mark the pencil made was the one I had made on my index finger with its lead, in thought, until it was black as soot.

It wasn’t until I googled why I couldn’t write that I came across the term writer’s block. Reading those words, I pictured a traffic barricade forcing my words to a standstill, stopping their journey to wherever I wanted them to travel. I pictured my ideas atrophying behind the barricades until they finally disappeared, taking my words with them. That image terrified me; what could be more terrible than a lack of ideas, an absence of intention? But then I thought, I could just be manifesting my lethargy into something bigger than myself; I could just be searching for something to blame for this apparent drought of words. It wasn’t late before self-doubt followed, and I started questioning what I had done wrong to scare off my creativity.

It took me a long time to realise that the inability to write was a very crucial part of writing because, without it, I wouldn’t sufficiently appreciate my words when they did decide to stop eluding me. I realised that self-doubt was something that would always follow me, no matter what I do, because it is a part of creating something, and the only power I had was to choose how I dealt with it.