Blibber Blabber June 3, 2011 at 5:48 pm
I always promise a bombardment of posts and then nothing happens. This site sits here… and sits here… and then a month later determination smacks me in the face and I finally write something. The problem isn’t that I have nothing to write about. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. I have too much to write about. The ideas are constantly swirling around in my head and when I sit down and try to put them all down on paper, I only end up doodling for a while or I end up aimlessly surfing the internet. By the time I finally get bored, I realize I’ve accomplished nothing and become so frustrated with myself that writing becomes an even bigger impossibility. This wouldn’t be too big of a problem if it didn’t happen so often but it does happen often and the more it happens, the less I write.
A lot of people might be thinking it’s not such a big deal. First of all, how many people really read this stuff anyways? Second, how many people really enjoy writing? The thing is that I do enjoy writing. I enjoy it a lot. And I notice that the less I write, the more my emotions seem to build up inside of me. Going a long time without writing is like a crackhead going a long time without crack; when the withdrawal hits hard, the crackhead and I both become extremely volatile. We foam at the mouth. We have paranoid anxiety attacks. We begin to feel a lot like we are going to explode and the physical evidence of this is seen in the way we begin to scratch a lot at our bodies or twitch or tug at the ends of our hair. Writing is my cocaine and going cold turkey too long and too frequently leaves me feeling crazy. (For the record, I’ve never done cocaine and what I know of crackheads is what I’ve seen in movies or read in books or from personal friendships.)
Obviously the easiest fix to this mess is to just WRITE (or in the crackhead world… just do more crack). But writing is never as easy as it sounds. Have you ever spun around and around in circles and then stopped and tried to focus? All you see are colored blobs and shapes and nothing seems to stop moving for a second or look right. That’s kind of what it’s like in my brain. You think, oh I’ll spin around and then I’ll stop and everything will be fine and I’ll make the world alright. Only it doesn’t work like that and it never will. And I sit down and I think, oh I’ll focus on one idea and I’ll finally write and release a little bit of what I’m feeling inside and I’ll make the world alright. But it doesn’t work like that for me either. I sit down and stare and doodle and surf the internet and nothing gets done and the withdrawal drags itself out more and more and more. And the biggest problem with this withdrawal is that it doesn’t get better. A crackhead may tell you that eventually stopping himself from doing crack is easy. He’s lying to you. From what I know of people who do drugs or were alcoholics or anything of that sort, it is never easy. One day you might wake up and think, this is the day where it’s going to be easy. But you pass somebody in the street smoking crack and suddenly it’s all too familiar and the urge is back again and the desire to join in overwhelms you. And that’s the way I feel. The longer I don’t write, the more I want to write… but the less I am able to do it. I start writing random words on pieces of paper just to see if it will somehow help the madness going on inside of me. I think one of these days that random word is going to spark a whole novel and I will finally feel at peace. But it never does and the random words are only a one-second fix until I finally lose it and I sit down and force my fingers to type out a bunch of nonsense that looks a lot like this.
I got on here to blog about something else and this is what came out instead. My first sentence is not even relatively close to the sentence I meant to type out. They never are. My writing is never planned. No matter what idea I may have, I sit down and something else comes out.
But on the bright side… at least I wrote something.
