I’m trying so hard. I’m staring at my screen, hoping against hope that the words will just come pouring out of me, like a waterfall. Like a dam full to bursting. Like… like something from which something else courses greatly, powerfully out of it.

That’s the problem, though. I sat for more minutes than I’d like to admit trying to come up with another simile for the act of a considerable flow of words leaving me. The words are there, I can feel them (if I close my eyes, I can see them), but they just won’t come out. And there’s no real dam, only an imaginary one. It’s in my brain, and it’s prohibiting me from expressing myself in perhaps the best way I know how to. It’s horrible, it’s debilitating, it turns me into my own worst enemy. I myself am prohibiting the progression of my livelihood, the thing that makes me feel like I can persevere, I can keep going, I can deal with it all because I can also document it, learn from it, become inspired by it, inspire others by it. At best, it’s an irksome sentiment that will, in the end, begrudgingly push me into extending my disbelief, into expanding the parameters of my capacity for creativity. At worst, it makes me feel like I cannot trust myself with my own best weapon, my own best defense, my own best method of communication.

I try and try everything I can: to coax myself into putting them out anyway, these words, no matter how bad I feel they might be; infantilize the task of writing itself so anything I put out automatically sounds more elevated than the original idea or goal; practice and practice and practice. I’ll write the words down in really small print in a notebook, so the farther you step away from it, the less intelligible it becomes, and the less I have to worry about people (and, admittedly, myself) actually ascertaining their meaning.

There is the wide belief that Writer’s Block is defined as a writer not knowing what they want to write about, and so they don’t write at all. I find that definition to not be completely inaccurate, but also not completely true. Writer’s Block is the condition a writer finds themselves in where they feel it’s “impossible to proceed with the writing of a novel, play, or other work”. The “impossibility” does not come from a lack of usable subject material, but rather from the literal inability to mark those words down in a way that is satisfactory to the writer. The writer may deem the words mediocre, not good enough, not elevated enough, just… not enough.

I think about my words way too much, I think. But I believe that comes with having always found writing to be a way better medium for expressing myself. Of course, I’ve grown better at it with time; I’ve learned that communication is the best key and, through that, verbal communication has, perhaps, more benefits than written communication (immediacy and better interpretation through delivery, for starters). I believe I can set myself up for unintentional failure because of the constant overthinking.

Perhaps if I just write it all down, anyway, and leave the judgment up to the Only One it really matters to (my belief is that He sees my craft as a gift and, as long as I’m using it for good, then I need not be worried about judgment at all), then maybe I can begin to start feeling more at peace with myself and my capabilities.