My latest battle with “writer’s block”

I’ve struggled with writing this past month. Every day the same thought: I need to write something for Medium. But no matter how much I wrote in my journal, I couldn’t get anything to gel. As the hours ticked off into days and days rolled into weeks, my writing angst deepened.

Like many on Medium, I dislike the term “writer’s block.” What does it even mean? Christina Ward calls it “a big fat myth…the writer’s Boogie Man.”

But what if I’m scared of the Boogie Man? When he comes to visit, he terrorizes not just my creative writing but my ability to compose even the simplest of emails. It takes minutes to draft something I should have dashed off in a few seconds. The doubt over every word is paralyzing.

It’s not the first time I’ve been here. Being paralyzed by my own self-doubts is a routine I know well. Every time it strikes, I tell myself I’m not aiming for perfection. But my subconscious doesn’t care; it will find a way to open the door to the Boogie Man.

In the music video for Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in The Wall, Part Two, an animated scene shows a tiny human figure huddled next to a wall of white bricks stretching up to the night sky. The wall wraps around the figure and forms an impenetrable tower; the figure merely a speck on the ground with no way out.

I feel like that speck. And spray painted inside the tower, as if some cruel joke, is the question repeating ad nauseam throughout my journals going back to my early twenties —

“What holds me back?”

I thought I had moved past this question in 2015 when I finished my Ph.D. Surely, that achievement would silence the question once and for all. It might have lowered the volume, but it didn’t mute it altogether.

In January 2017, I wrote in my journal, “Every year I commit to writing throughout the year, and every year I fail.” My wall would become a tower, and I’d be trapped inside with my self-doubts and insecurities — the bricks in my wall.

Maybe I struggle because I’m drawn to memoir writing, baring my soul for the world to see and judge. When I was 10, I hand-copied words from a novel about a dog to practice my penmanship, but truthfully, I did it because I loved seeing the words come to life beneath my fingers. I was telling a story. But the idea of telling my own story terrifies me. My calling in writing seems like some ironic twist of fate.

I’ve felt compelled to write for most of my life, and my well-being depends on it. When I don’t write, not even in my journal, my mood sinks. By denying my writing, I’m denying a part of myself. It’s as if I was given this need to write for a reason, to examine my past and come to terms with it.

When I started writing a memoir about a painful experience as a teen, I discovered what made me abruptly stop writing in my journal and ignore it for long stretches. The more I wrote, the more I felt I was inching closer to the shadowy corners of my mind where part of my childhood exists in hidden memories.

The mind, especially one of a child, has an amazing ability to protect us from things we never should have seen or experienced.

Is it possible that my brain became so accustomed to blocking out memories of bad experiences that the switch got stuck, creating a block to my creative side? Is it this switch that makes writing feel like I’m slogging through thick mud, the slurp-slurp sound of my shoes peeling away from the slop marking my slow progress to nowhere?

Perhaps that’s the answer I’ve been looking for. What holds me back is not fear of rejection or fear that I’ll look stupid. Rather, the more I write, the closer I get to myself, to the truth of my life.

And I’m scared of what I may find there.

It might be more than I bargained for.

Originally published in Indelible Ink on Medium on October 10, 2019.