Cunning obstructions

by DRM

I worked my way out of a 20-year pho­bia about writ­ing and now I don’t know what’s what.

When I write with focus and sim­plic­ity, I feel the energy of under­stand­ing. I fin­ish the ses­sion glad that I wrote something.

Then a stretch passes where I don’t get the glad feel­ing and I don’t write as fre­quently. I have projects that are con­cep­tu­al­ized, one large one that is under­way, and make no progress. I don’t get up early in the morn­ing to do a writ­ing exer­cise. In the night, when I mean to spend a lit­tle time on the big project, I end up surf­ing the web or read­ing or watch­ing a TV show that I’ve down­loaded on my laptop.

I don’t know what to think about it.

I mean, for 20 years, I wasn’t mak­ing no progress. I just went away from writing.

Over the past two years I worked my way around to an under­stand­ing that has been lib­er­at­ing and con­firm­ing, shed­ding a chimera of self-doubt to accept what Bar­bara Euland calls the “nec­es­sary and life-giving” qual­i­ties of cre­ative work.

Now, when the momen­tum of cre­ative work falls away I run through a set of hypothe­ses: I am pro­cras­ti­nat­ing; some­thing in my big project is stop­ping me; I am dis­tracted by my pro­fes­sional work and the logis­tics of our fam­ily life; I am think­ing about too many things.

But the puz­zle is that I am not doing some­thing that is restor­ing, that I enjoy for the inte­rior walk, the teas­ing out of the thread of under­stand­ing, the push of excite­ment, the moment of fin­ish­ing and know­ing that you fig­ured out why a per­son blinked, or what made them sigh heav­ily in the check-out counter at the gro­cery, or how they came to be sit­ting qui­etly at the end of a stone wall, on an empty coun­try road, with a Barney’s bag at their feet.

Then, as I won­der what I need to do to bring the work back to cen­ter, I real­ize that this must be the pho­bia again, work­ing its obstruct­ing ways. What a cun­ning lit­tle emo­tion! Even as I ven­ture the cause to myself, my mind throws down a bar­rier of instan­ta­neous thought: “Oh no, that’s not true, you got over that.”

But I didn’t clearly. Because I begin to do the cre­ative work again, a lit­tle bit at a time, and begin to feel the bal­anced pur­pose again, and begin to hear clear thoughts as I string one word after another.

Some rhythm returns.

The pho­bia is thwarted, for now.