Blocked!

You’ve heard of Writer’s Block? That sneaky, relentless, frustrating disease that paralyzes a writer’s brain every time he or she attempts to sit down at a keyboard and actually write something?

I seem to have caught it.

And unfortunately, it’s not a disease that would respond to any ordinary treatment, such as a pill or surgery. Although after enough time staring at a blank page, radical brain surgery seems like a very good idea. Only not to cut something out. To put something – anything – in!

The only medicine that I know for it is very unpleasant and definitely not fun, at least not at first. It doesn’t come in a bottle or have a co-pay, and it can’t ever be passively administered by a nurse or a mother or any other caregiver. Our poor blocked writer has to self-administer the nasty stuff.

Because the only cure I’ve ever found for Writer’s Block is to write. Just write. Something. Anything. Get the fingers moving. Make the keyboard tap-tap-tap. Keep going until thoughts begin to take shape and turn into coherent sentences on the screen.

Like – I hope – right about now. Because I’ve been trying to figure out what to write for a week, and have come up with at least a dozen ideas, and haven’t been able to get started writing even one. Well, no, actually I did start writing one. It went something like this:

“This week I read a book about … and it made me think about … and …”

Other than the title and the subject of the book, that was pretty much it. Scintillating stuff, huh?

So I decided today that the problem is too many ideas. Just can’t make a decision. After all, I was born with an indecisiveness curse. Really, I was. Born exactly at midnight, that is, at least according to my mother. She said the doctor and nurses argued over whether midnight ended an old day or started a new day, and of course the doctor won, picked the new day, and recorded my time of birth as 12:01 a.m. And that’s why I have a very hard time making decisions and choosing between alternatives.

It’s a good excuse, anyway.

So sure enough, true to form, no sooner had I decided that having too many blog ideas was my problem with getting down to the actual business of writing about one of them, than I changed my mind and decided something entirely different.

Namely, that I was blocked by fear. Of all of you. Or, to be more precise, of failing all of you.

Because I have received some wonderful and highly gratifying feedback on my first three blogs, and that’s really kind of scary. A kind of omigod-they-like-it-what-if-I-can’t-keep-it-up scary. A fear-of-success brand of scary. A maybe-it-would-be-safer-to-quit-while-I’m-ahead sort of scary. A why-in-heaven’s-name-did-I-start-a-blog-and-what-made-me-think-anybody-would-ever-want-to-read-it scary.

But then, I know quite a bit about all those kinds of scary. I used to go to ARTS meeting in Chicago. That’s Artists Recovering Through the Twelve Steps. Most twelve-step groups exist to help participants stop something – drinking or overspending or co-dependence, whatever – but this one existed to help people start something. Their art, whatever it might be. In our group there were not only musicians and painters and writers and dancers and actors, there were also weavers and doll makers and wood workers – anybody who needed help getting started with actually doing whatever it was they liked and needed to do.

Some of us had confidence problems because of old but still painful parental attitudes towards our art. Some of us found it hard to believe that being an artist – especially a professional of any sort – was a legitimate and worthwhile goal in a society that bestows its highest honors on whoever makes the most money. Many of us found it hard to believe that we had anything to say, in whatever form we said it, important enough for anyone else to hear or see. A few had been very successful in their particular fields and were stymied by the real or perceived pressures of that very success.

Most of us probably had a little of all that and more, to varying degrees.

Hence, today, now, this week, here I am. Writer’s Block.

But hey, look at this, I’ve written – wait, let me count – 726 words that appear to be at least marginally coherent and possibly a tiny bit interesting. So maybe I should just stop here and have confidence that next week I’ll be able to pick one of those other topics and write about it.

Which, really, will be the only option. After all, blocked or not, I can’t use this one again!