Wow. It was really hard to start this post. Even now, I find my gaze wandering around the room as I type. My defense mechanism is doing everything it can to keep me from thinking too deeply about why I shouldn’t think too deeply.

Because if I think deeply, things might change, and that makes me afraid. I might get what I want, and that makes me feel guilty. I might fail, and then I’ve let everybody down. I might be imperfect–in front of everybody, no less–which is unacceptable. Every active step is another step toward upending other people, and this is unforgiveable. So I stay where I am.

Except, to stay where I am means I must distract myself, so I actually can’t stay still for more than a few minutes at a time. I must have plenty of projects going at once. That way when I finish one I can move right on to another, which leaves no time for ponderings that might lead me down another path. When I solve one problem, there’s another waiting. Thank God I’m doing such a good job with the distractions, because otherwise I’d have to admit that writing is my calling after all, and I’m really just scared.

And you know, this is all pretty silly, because it’s nothing I haven’t figured out before. The surprise is how strong the roots around my ankles are. Why has it come to a head now? Maybe because the roots have grown bigger than I realized, and they threaten to strangle me. It’s fear, all right. Fear of success, failure, change. Fear of meeting myself, of imperfection, but most of all, fear of emotion. Fear of losing control, of hurting someone or myself with those pesky emotions that seem to always be at odds with my surroundings. Why does it have to be so hard? I know what I want to feel, what I should feel, so why can’t I feel it?

I’ve been stuffing my emotions for so long now that I can’t comprehend what I’ve just written. Trying to edit the previous paragraphs would strip them of all meaning, if you can understand them in the first place. This is raw, just like the fear that I am only beginning to allow into the light, and this post might not be here tomorrow.

I feel like an asshole, knowing other people write in the face of greater pressures and still being unable somehow to overcome my piddly ones. But the one thing I’ve known the entire time is that it’s a mental block. The stress isn’t only an excuse, it’s a real reason. What I haven’t known is why stress shuts me down.

So the reason I’m finally writing about this is because I think I’ve placed another piece, possibly the most important piece, of my psychological puzzle.

Now, I’ve mentioned the fear of success in passing in previous reflections on writer’s block, but I’ve never taken it seriously. I mean, how douchey does fearing success sound? “I’m so good it scares me.” Right. But last night I was telling my kids how I didn’t apply myself in college, a typical parent’s warning to learn from my mistakes. All night the memory nagged me, the memory of what it felt like to choose to skip voice lessons that last semester, to avoid going to the piano practice rooms (and then when I got there to study history instead of playing scales), to be glad to excuse my slacking by pointing to my full-time job.

And it felt familiar. Well yeah, of course it’s familiar because I went through it, but it felt recently familiar. And then I made the connection. It’s the same thing I do today with writing. The same reluctance to begin. The same restlessness when I finally sit down to write. The same anxiety about what I should be doing as opposed to what I am doing, and it doesn’t seem to matter what those two things are. In fact, they switch places regularly.

Once I realized this connection I started to make others. I’ll go into those in the next post. This is a biggie. I hope I can see it through.

Guest Post: How to Cure Your Writer’s Block

One thing that stops me from writing is thinking of how huge the project is. This article reminds me it’s not as big as I think.

I think I would like to talk about writer’s block someday, when I am further removed from it.

Now back to the boredom.…*sigh*