Come Back to Me

I started writing at the time most people probably say they do. Pre-teen angst: so many feelings but never wanting to talk, begging for someone to understand but convincing myself that no one could possibly understand at all.

So, I wrote. Pretty melodramatic, cringe-worthy doom and gloom pieces but even in their darkest form, there was something so raw about them, something terribly naïve that has kept me stuck in the moment so many years later.

Stuck.

There’s a word that I’ve come to loathe. A word constantly used as an excuse, a crutch. Because if you’re stuck, people develop a form of understanding. Like some uncontrollable force is keeping you still, stalling your progress, and there’s not much you can do until you just become un-stuck.

How?

No one knows. One day the powers that be will release you from this cursed hold and you’ll be able to carry on, years, months, days later, until something else comes along that you can’t quite grab the reigns on and you become stuck once more.

I’ve been stuck.

I’ve used it has a crutch. One day I was writing so much I couldn’t keep anything in. Words were flowing nonstop, unfiltered, and little masterpieces kept forming without my consciousness. Then it was gone. I can’t pin point the time of day or the day on the calendar, but all I knew is that I had nothing left to say. All the stories were written, and all the one liners that popped into my head before sleep took hold just didn’t come to me anymore.

I was more than stuck. I was done. I wasn’t a writer anymore.

Is that what happens to people who write? Do they ever stop being writers? Even after years of never creating stories, and worlds, and characters? Is it a title you lose just like that?

For years I pushed it off. I threw myself into reading because if I couldn’t write, at least I could read. I hadn’t stopped knowing how to do that. And even if I didn’t feel like a writer anymore, I could be close enough to writers who still had the imagination surging through them.

And then I became stuck in other ways. So much so that this stuck, which was once a gag in my throat, fizzled into a persistent, chronic, gnawing in the back of my mind. Easy to overlook if I tried hard enough.

I wasn’t a writer and I started to live with it until the gnawing grew again and I knew there was more. There had to be more. I couldn’t just not have anything left to say. I could feel wisps of stories reaching out in my brain. I could feel them solidify just beyond the grasp of words but when I went to write, they would freeze up as if they were too scared to come out. I couldn’t make them. And if they did, they were gone in a fraction of the time it took to type them. Sometimes the delete button can be your worst enemy.

But this is a new year. The powers that be have not graced me with the gift of un-stuckness. After years of battling with creative demons, I have decided that I need to unstick myself.

My goal, my oath to you, dear reader, and mostly myself, is to create a post-a-day to cast my writer’s block away.

I am a writer.

Join me, and I’ll show you.