Blockage
July 30th, 2007
At fourteen I thought Douglas Adams’ lesson on flying, to throw yourself at the ground and miss, was about the cleverest thing ever. Now, when I have a day when a grocery list seems like a tremendous creative stretch, I find myself trying to figure out what it is I am so actively not writing about as I jump up to re-fill my coffee cup, wipe the spattered bathroom mirror, start another load of laundry. But that writing should come about by just putting down whatever it is that I am not writing about seems as slick a trick as flying by missing the ground.
There’s this feeling of something missing, and I try to imagine what it is I most want to read. Were I to click on a blog of erised, which shows you what you most want to see, what wisdom would be waiting for me, what brilliance, what wit? Would it be something where I could recognize myself, because ultimately, what I really, truly want is reassurance, comfort, and, dammit, a little bit of flattery? Would it be some simple truth, some insight into a happy life, getting along with others, producing stuff you’re proud of, staying connected, sleeping well? A story of facing a challenge and coming through well which reads like validation of all the challenges you’re struggling against? The sort of dark humor about how insane all of this is?
What you learn about yourself when you force the long hand writing of three pages every day, is that sometimes you have to take it pen stroke by pen stroke, sometimes you get to take it idea by idea, they come in this big knot that you can hardly sort out. You learn how dreadfully you overuse some words (this is also evident when your three year old likes saying “actually”), and what things never stop bugging you. You learn about the relativity of time. You learn that you can carry the sting of no one wanting to sit next to you in the cafeteria in middle school for more than twenty years, so that when grown women carry on with the some sort of excluding behavior there is no comfort — even when they aren’t people you even like. You learn to write lots of letters to yourself, dear self, take a breath, it is all going to be ok, even if you can’t see it right now. You learn that you are a person who doesn’t procrastinate well because when there is something unpleasant to be done, it’s all you can think about. You learn how fabulous it is to have a friend who understands and explains you can tell your brain it’s in time-out whenever it starts endless cycling on that unpleasantness.
So maybe it’s not exactly blockage, it’s just that good days are sometimes followed by difficult days, and sometimes difficult days are followed by even more difficult days. And some days there are a lot of things which aren’t blogging that require a lot of energy.
