The Block that Kills

For years I remember living life in form of words. I remembering itching to open the unfinished book, the minute I had a few spare moments. I remember craving to go back to my desk, the minute something interesting happened, so that I can allow my mind to write my experience, my thoughts in intrinsically woven sentences and words. It gave me an adrenalin rush to relive those moments, losing myself in the web of words. It did not matter who read it. All that mattered was I recorded it, for myself. For years I kept a diary. Then, I started writing articles, short stories, musings… and before I knew it, I was a journalist. Then one fine evening, a friend, sitting miles away, very gently coaxed me into writing blogs. And I was an active blogger for years I wrote blogs and then, just as suddenly, it all just STOPPED. I looked at my blog with absolute amazement today and realized that my last updated post was over two and half years ago!

Initially it was absolute lack of time. Even if something really interesting happened, in the race of life there was just no time to pen it down. I remember getting up in the middle of the night, still tired due to day’s stress, itching to get up and write. But exhaustion and sleep would get the better of me, and those words remained unwritten. The exercise of writing everyday slowly got confined to weekends, and weekends slowly turned to months and months slowly turned to years.

Today as I look back, I remember going through the days when I was angry, irritated, frustrated because I hadn’t had the chance to sit peacefully and just write or type. But like everything else, I began to train my mind to stop feeling. Convinced myself that I will write soon, when I find time. I trained my mind to oppress the desperate need to record my thoughts, the itch to write, convincing myself that sometime soon, I will find the time to write again. I was killing days waiting to find the time to write. Maybe I was just fooling myself, who knows.

However, in all these years, I hardly realized that I was actually not killing time, I was killing the motivation and the enthusiasm and slowly the ability to write. And today, like a badly oiled, unused machine that just doesn’t work, the words and creativity seem to have stopped working. I find myself staring at the screen for hours together, not writing a word. At times, out of sheer desperation I write, only to realize that the writing is neither good… nor ME!
For someone who’s real passion in life was to write, inability to express my thoughts in words has become a real handicap. What does one do, when the very thing that defines them just goes away? I cringe each time I say “I am a writer” for my mind screams, “I used to be a writer…”

I can still feel it all in my head, I can feel the sentences stringing together in my mind, I can see the completed product before my mind’s eyes, and yet, the minute I sit to write, I go blank. People have told me, like swimming and cycling you cannot really forget how to write, sometimes you write well, sometimes you don’t. I have reached a place, where I do not write AT ALL. It’s like losing my armour in the middle of a battlefield. And it sucks… It really does. Because now, I have actually become comfortable not writing! And it is so difficult to tear myself from that comfortable place. But some day, hopefully soonish, I will be out there again, trying to write again.