So, here I am, putting a few really good posts out over the course of a week, and then bang! I'm all juiced out. Dried up. I find myself struggling to open up OpenOffice writer to type words on the page. It is not so much that I do not know what to write about, I have lots of things that I think I know something about and that I can go on and on for a length of time.
But I do not want to write. I want to do other things. Compulsively eat. Clean my sock drawer. Threaten to wash the dog. Download last night's Futurama. Play on Facebook. Read Huffington Post (but only the non-political sections). Check AWStats to see yesterday's site hits Anything, anything, but write an interesting and informative blog post about some topic that people will enjoy reading.
I set an unreasonably high threshold for myself, one that deep down inside, I knew I would likely fail at, only to get myself into a good habit. Now that I have started to fail, there is a little voice inside of me that says, "Why bother? It's not worth it. Nobody really wants to read what you have to say. Your writing is unpolished. Your research is lazy. Your opinions are shared by nobody but yourself. You think you know things but you really don't know anything." And on and on.
And that, there, is the part part of the cycle that I am really fighting to break. I do not know if this is legitimate writer's block. I have ideas pouring through my head, and to be honest, I have no problem actually typing them on to my OpenOffice page. The block is, for all intents and purposes, in actually getting myself to the page. It is some sort of psychological disorder that will not allow me to do something I really love to do. It is less of a writer's block than it is a writer's paralysis.
So what is this all about? I get a great anxiety when I am getting ready to do something that I really love to do and am actually pretty good at. Sometimes it is even a loathing. Writer's paralysis is a fairly apt description because it is only by a huge effort of willpower that I can even write the first word.
I think I know how to combat it, though. Keep plugging away at it. Do it despite feeling anxious and loathsome about it. Sit down and write. It does not matter if it is interesting. It does not matter if people are going to praise me for it. I should not even really worry about what people reading it might think, because this is me being accountable to myself.
That way I can get through those really awful periods where I just do not want to sit down and write about anything and actually have something to show despite the fact that I did not want to write about anything. And if you are reading this, have faith. Even during those times when I do not want to write but sit down and write about anything, it will not always be talking about writing and not writing and how I can get myself to write more effectively.
Because that would not be productive at all. That would be boring.
And boring all the time is bad.
