Start and Stop - A Battle With Writer's Block.

How does the brain open and shut like that?  In one moment you sit melancholy or depressed, the next the synapses fire, and all of a sudden, you feel alive.  You come from a clouded space, one full of noise and angst only to later be filled so fully in the spirit of creation.  You don't care about the typos, you don't care if it all makes sense, but you type as fast as you can to make something new.

The formatting might be wrong.  There might be a wrong version of "too or to," but in the end, you erase the feeling of being incapable.  If even for five minutes in a day, you feel you can create anything that your mind wants.  Cheeseburgers in outer space?  A kitten with the ability to speak?  The possibilities are only limited by your own imagination.

But sometimes when I begin to write, or after writing for a while, the synapses seem to close; they seem to dull, and all of a sudden, I'm writing slower than when I started, and I want to go back, re-write it all and delete everything. 

That feeling makes me feel sick.

So I try to push on, writing about whatever it is I thought I first had an inspiration for, trying to push something out that I feel will validate me.  Something that'll showcase my talent for writing as well as hopefully something that's worth reading.

Often times the things that I've written are simply saved as drafts in this very blog.  Unfinished started and stopped works that I had an initial inspiration for but one reason or another stopped before completion.

So what it seems I might be at war with now, is my own apathy.  My own ability to have a streaming consciousness put onto the page and have it make sense.

And what if it doesn't?


Or if it's not funny, or not dramatic enough? 

I have to take solace that at least I had the courage to put my thoughts to paper, to attempt to try and create a sense of permanence to the idea of creation.  And even if the stories are muddled with mistakes, of which I'm sure I make plenty of, I still fought for a life that is defined by the actions I wanted to take and create. 

The other part is to keep writing as often as possible.  To keep to the routine and not move so arbitrarily; writing something one day and nothing the next. 

I'm not paid to write, I do it as a hobby and to keep that hope alive that one day maybe I could work for a living with maybe a magazine or some other media outlet.

Of course for that to work, you need to be worth reading and produce copious amount of material.  Something that I'm currently lacking.

Still, I feel the need to keep plugging away, in a sense, because I like it. 

Even now, as I think of this particular piece as a somewhat cliche "'Struggling to write,' writes writer," it makes me feel alive in a way that not writing makes me feel lost.  It's kind of like how when an athlete stops exercising.  You begin to feel a little bit down, until you pick yourself back up and do it again.

Maybe that's what this is.  That feeling of getting back into the swing of things, and becoming the person I always intended to be.