It's not going as well as I had hoped and I wonder, was I ever able to write?
I start to feel as though I've been through several rounds of shock therapy. My mind is a blank. I can't begin to form ideas, never mind sentences. I can't find my voice and wonder if I've ever had one. Hours go by, then days, then weeks, and still, I've gotten nowhere.
Yesterday I took a break and watched an episode of Next Design Star with Jess. The designers were given identical white rooms with a few equally stark pieces of furniture and asked to transform their spaces into something magical. Some of them performed exceptionally well. Some of them played it safe. A few of them failed miserably.
I look at the blank screen before me and I see that white room. I wonder who lives there. I want to fill that room and make it my own, but suddenly I'm at a loss. I start to feel a little more sympathetic towards those designers on that show, the ones that couldn't pull it off. At least my failure to write isn't being televised.
All year I've been telling myself that I couldn't write because I didn't have the time, and now I have months off from school. I imagined it would be easier, that I would sit down each morning and the ideas would just flow.
It's not like I'm not trying. I write as soon as I am up and have my first cup of coffee in hand. I write, or at least try to, for hours. Then I read. I do writing exercises. I journal. As you see, I've even decided to try to blog again, not that this will get me anywhere. I've gone through my files, dug up old flash drives, reread all the false starts and practice pages I've done for the past two years, just hoping for a spark. Some glimmer of inspiration.
But it's not happening.
Then Jess comes in and I tell her how bad I feel, and how I can't write, and probably never could. She looks at me with compassion and understanding and points to the photocopied page I've taped over my desk, a critique of a short story I wrote in one one of my classes by a classmate whose work I greatly admired. His comments had been so positive that I posted a copy where I could always see it when I needed to, as a reminder. If I can make just one person feel something... He called my work "astonishing". What a beautiful word. I can't help smiling a little at that. Once I was "astonishing".
Jess makes me feel better and then she leaves me to write.
I know that I'm being harder on myself than I have to. The only expectations I have to live up to are my own. There are no deadlines except for the ones I've created for myself. The laundry, the housework, the errands all can wait. I have time.
