Writer’s Block Has the Best of Me and I Start a Writing Workshop on Monday

I can’t write I can’t write I can’t write I can’t write I can’t write and it’s making me crazy. My life is an endless mess of started and never finished essays, of ideas I’m too lazy to follow through on, of frustrations.

My journal seems to be the only place I can write anymore. When I try to write anywhere else, I try too hard and the words come out all forced and mangled and misshapen. My journal is a freedom space.  If only I could figure out how to recreate that.  If only my ribs didn’t hurt.  If only I weren’t so lazy.  And if only I could remember that I’m better than I used to be and give myself some credit for that.

It’s like I’ve forgotten how to write and so I’m desperately reading essay after essay to remind me how and I’m failing. It’s scary. I’m afraid I’ll never remember, or I’m afraid that maybe I’ve read myself to death, over thought it all to the point where I’ll never be able to write again.  I remember shortly after I learned how to knit a couple of years ago, I forgot how to cast on, which is how you initially get the yarn on the knitting needle and a vital step to knitting anything. I tried to remember what the woman who’d taught me to knit had shown me and I couldn’t, so I searched the Internet and stared at diagram after diagram and tried to logically and analytically peel them apart, but my brain has never been good with diagrams. I thought I would never be able to knit again, and then my roommate glanced at a diagram and quickly showed me how to cast on. My roommate. Who had never knit a day in her life.  Why can’t someone swoop in and show me how to write again?

I feel the way I feel when I try to dance-stiff, without rhythm or feeling. When I was in college I had a really awesome Nigerian professor who a few years ago tried to teach me how to dance at my school’s Cultural Festival. He pulled me onto the dance floor and shouted above the sounds of the African band. ”Follow the beat of the drum, or the bass!” he said.  I looked at him in confusion and cocked my head to the side and listened, trying to pull out the beat of the bass.  He grabbed my shoulders every time the drummer smacked his drum.  “Bounce!” he said.  “Now bounce!”  Over and over again he pressed down on my shoulders, but my version of bouncing was to stiffly bend my knees and then pop back up equally as stiffly, and always a second too late.  Finally, he shrugged, laughed, and shook his head, and I knew he’d given up on me.