I’ll be completely honest with you all. I have no idea what to write.
I’m normally not someone who is at a loss for words or struggles to come up with ideas on which to give my opinion or shed light. I am someone who always has something to say, so when I find myself in a place where my brain is oddly quiet, I am filled with so much dread and turmoil. How could I possibly have nothing to write? How can my brain be thoughtless? How, when every day I have experiences and conversations I can turn into creative opportunities, do I find myself falling short?
Writer’s block for someone who always has something to say is SO FRUSTRATING.
Part of my struggle comes from not knowing what you guys want me to say or what you’re expecting to hear from me. Do you want me to write an article about vegetarianism? Religion? Giving advice? Do you want me to write about my darkest fears and my most optimistic dreams?
There are so many of you that read my articles each week or make a true effort to catch as many as possible in your social media feeds, and I appreciate every single one of you. I want to bring you content that makes you laugh and cry and empathize with others. I want you to enjoy reading my pieces and to come back week after week looking for the next inspired piece.
But sometimes I fail to deliver, and I’ve noticed this especially lately. Because I’ve been so crunched for time recently, I found myself writing articles about seemingly small issues, like stress during exam time, for which I created a list of cute dog videos on the internet, or 500-word pieces like my article on books I own but have yet to read. These pieces feel like such cop-outs. They feel like writing something, anything, just to have something submitted before a deadline. They feel like fluff pieces, or like click bait, and I hate the idea of taking writing, an art, a creative outlet, and using it to get views and likes and commercializing it for some sort of profit.
Whenever I write these fluffy pieces, I feel a sense of betrayal both to you, my audience, and to myself. You all deserve so much better than fluff. You deserve better than articles written to make you feel like the world is full of sunshine and rainbows all the time. You deserve better than someone avoiding writing or commenting about certain issues when no one else has the guts to say something. These are the kind of values I try to hold myself to, and in writing nonsense pieces lately, I have sacrificed my own integrity. Granted, I will always refuse to write for likes or for views, and I will resist the business model of our capitalist society that tries to encourage creators of all kinds to produce content that misleads viewers or takes advantage of them based on their appearance simply for the sake of those views and likes.
I am a creator. I am an artist. I am a free thinker, and I refuse to live and write and act like a machine.
But like a robot, I’ve been spitting out words and paragraphs and sentences only when instructed to do so by a higher power, in this case, my Odyssey deadline, and I apologize for devaluing my own work and for sacrificing my own integrity. I apologize for taking away from you a piece that is well-written and thought out, a piece that opens your eyes or helps you to understand a concept or idea better.
Even now that I’ve written over 600 words, I still have a distinct lack of ideas on what I could possibly write about this week. I’ve got zilch. Zip. Nada. Here’s to next week, when, hopefully, I’ll be struck with an incredible idea to essay about.
