Block and Anxiety

Honestly I don't really feel like writing tonight. I have a great story, characters that I love and for some reason, I still can't quite bring myself to try to put it on the page. The story is considerably different than anything I've ever done before, and at first I was worried that it wouldn't work out. To my surprise it's worked out better than I could have ever expected. Yet somehow I still can't continue tonight. All I can do is stare at my computer, watching the minutes passing me by.

There are many people that say that writer's block doesn't exist, that it is simply an excuse not to write. Sometimes this is true I guess, after all writer's tend to be chronic procrastinators. Yet more often, writer's block is a battle against anxiety. We pour our hearts and souls into what we write, drawing from our deepest hopes and fears for inspiration. It is almost literally baring our souls to the world and it is completely terrifying. It reminds me of a description I read once in a book on personality theory, used to describe the INFP personality type. My type.

When we're young, we are the most likely out of the children in any given classroom to have imaginary friends. To us, they are very real. Sometimes so real, that we never even realized that other children couldn't see what we did. Most children grow out of this, though it's still a traumatic thing to realize that the friends we hold so dear matter so little to the people around us. Some of us though, grow up to be writers, that still can't quite bring themselves to say goodbye. It sounds strange to say, but many of my closest friends are still those that only my eyes can see, at least until I can attempt to bring them to life on the page. So, in a manner of speaking, when I write I bare not only my own soul, but those of my greatest friends. To give these pieces of myself to a world that might not care, or worse yet, care enough to call what I love worthless, is easily the hardest thing I'll ever do. These words are pieces of my heart, please, take care of them.