Writer's Shock... er, I mean Block

Back in December, I wrote a post called “Odds and Ends.”  Basically, it was a collection of a few short pieces that had no relation to each other.  There wasn’t much sense in the post, and I did it only because I could not come up with anything good or insightful to write.  The “Odds and Ends” piece was an attempt to get something out – anything – and break my stagnation, my writer’s block.

And here I am again with the same malady: writer’s block – except that this time if feels more like a shock than a block.  I just can’t seem to get myself going, to get the wheels greased, to get the juices flowing, to… well, you get the idea.  I have been creatively stifled since early June.  It’s like I’ve been in a kind of deep shock.  Sure, I wrote a piece about the heart attacks of Andrew Breitbart and James Gandolfini, as well as a rambling piece of garbage about denying reality.  But they were, in my opinion, substandard – just an attempt to get something into the blog, even if it wasn’t what I really wanted to say.

But that's the problem; since at least early June, I haven't known what I want to say.  I have at least five or six posts that I started and have not been able to finish.  And don't EVEN ask me about my book!  I am not sure why, but it most likely has to do with my mental state for the past six weeks.  It's not been good, and it's hard to be at your creative best when your mind seems to be in survival mode.

Almost two weeks ago, I suffered the ignominy of a burglary in my apartment.  A few days later, I tried to write about it, to get my emotions into words.  But I couldn’t finish it.  And I’ve had a few other things that I’ve started since early June, but either I haven’t been able to finish them, or I’ve looked at what I wrote and recoiled with disgust I had written.  There is often value in writing what you feel, in order to purge your emotions, but just as often the result is not for sharing and perhaps better suited for burning.

The past six weeks have been one of the worst periods, personally, in memory.  The burglary, and the fallout from it, has been the most obvious “bad event,” but not the worst.  The hardest thing about the burglary, after the initial shock, has been the process of analyzing who could have been responsible, considering the logical suspicions of the police against my own emotional resistance to believing it, trying to find the right course to get the necessary information to either validate the police notion or support my own belief, and trying to find clues that reinforce the scenario I DO believe is true.  In some of this I have failed, miserably, but in the latter I think there is hope.

And on top of it all, the sciatic nerve problem has returned.  This just hasn’t been my summer, it seems.

I find myself alternating between self-pity and being on the verge of just throwing in the towel on the one hand, and seeing this as a test of will and a challenge to keep myself positive and moving forward in the face of calamity on the other.  Often I really ask myself why I am here in Ukraine and what I am doing with my life – always with no good answer.  But then I recover from that morass and see it all as a situation I must have created in order to grow and realize something important about myself and about life – perhaps something to be shared… when I figure it out.

Recently, I wrote the following short piece on VKontakte:

Life is not always "peachy." Bad things sometimes happen to good people. We don't always get what we want, we have disappointments, we get hurt. But life goes on, and you have a choice whether to go on with it, or let yourself wallow in misery and die slowly inside.

No matter how deep the hurt or disappointment, you HAVE to put it aside, regain your positive attitude, and move on to bigger and better things. Some time later, when we look back at the time of that particular bad thing, we often find that something better came of it - there was a GOOD REASON why that disappointment had to happen - but we can only realize this if we orient our thinking this way!

As Clint Eastwood said in his movie, "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Dying is no way to make a living." Whatever the bad thing is, it's better to put it aside, find your smile, and get on with the business of living!

So, it’s a conscious effort to get on with the business of living.  I find myself being more careful about my self-talk.  That is a big deal.  And I am finally taking some steps to spend less time sitting at the computer, endlessly digesting news from the Internet.  That is also a big deal.  My bike is cleaned up and ready to be ridden – as soon as I get the hip fixed – and I have taken the first positive steps to start lifting again, slowly.

Recently I FINALLY started doing morning pages as suggested in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.  As I expected, getting started is terrible, but I think it’s an important thing for me to do if I ever want to realize my potential as a writer in the short time I have left.  So I am forcing myself to do it.

These are some good beginnings, but only time will tell if I am able to keep momentum and turn them into changed behaviors that stick.  And only time will tell if I can add some of the other changes I need to make.  But I choose to believe that I can and I will. 

Still, however, I am creatively and emotionally blocked right now.  I can see it and I can feel it.  I have become colder than I have ever been.  It seems necessary for now, and to be honest, I think this change is serving me well.  I just hope I don’t become too accustomed to it, because I don’t think it’s for the best in the long term.  But as with other things, I guess time will tell.

So... this is, really, another crap post.  When you are creatively blocked, I guess you write stuff like this.  It’s all that can squeeze past the stone that is wedged into the creativity conduit.  But maybe it’s enough to start the process of breaking the stone and washing away the pieces… in time.

A Final Thought

I mean, seriously… how in the world is Eric Holder still the Attorney General of the USSA?  Oh, yeah… it’s the USSA.