the other block
Procrastination is in my blood. It has been part of my family since the very beginning; once we stopped procrastinating our family crest was finally designed yet the concept of pride became uncool and Latin extremely unpopular. Procrastination is an inherited trait for all of us (more so for Uni students), it may appear to be a curse from generations of substance abuse or discovering cat videos, but procrastinating has forced us to be in the right “zone” to start our work. We watch “just one more episode” of New Girl before we start that essay, or in my case I wait for that one inspirational song to burst into life on shuffle to motivate my writing. Several thousand tracks later I discovered I wasn’t procrastinating, I was suffering writers block.
I have blamed my constant procrastination for the lack of writing as much as I have blamed the absence of cloudy skies for my overly cheery poetry. Unfortunately after setting up my work space at my local café, ordering a few dozen long macs, laptop and notebook both open I found myself staring blankly at the baristas making a day’s worth of coffee. I didn’t get down a single sentence that day, I couldn’t fathom one idea in an hour and I wouldn’t stop for a minute tapping my pen on my notebook. My notebook has remained dusty and untouched like my sexual organ.
There are two ways I can describe writer’s block. It is as if I am trapped in a tiny cubicle, words I can’t comprehend flows upwards around me and letters slam into the side of my head like a hailstorm. I was drowning in my unused ink; my head pushed under every time I gasped for air, a frozen wasteland that is iced over forcing me to give up and sleep. The second colourful description is it’s like being cockblocked from your ideas.
One of my friends explained to me “You have to be feeling good to write, strip everything down and write. Give it a shot.” I gave it a shot, I stripped myself of pride and dignity and clothes. Yet it was too cold, uncomfortable and well, the internet gets distracting when you’re naked. I tried listening to Fleet Foxes. I tried Radiohead. I turned off the music. I wrote outside in the nude. I wrote inside. Nothing, so I made myself a tea. An iced coffee. I drank red wine in the nude. I wrote with a pen. I dictated. I even tried interpretive dance, no that’s a lie. Still, nothing! In the process I began to question myself: If I can’t think of anything to write, am I truly a writer?
Finding a way to make sense of creative blocks is difficult; perhaps it is psychological, emotional or just a simple distraction. We know that there will always be a struggle between paper and pen, camera and subject, dress and model, and yourself and ideas. Writer’s block has acted like a suppression of emotion, a desaturation of my creative outlook. Simply it cannot be ignored until it disappears (like Zooey Deschanel) but it can be dealt with one agonising word at a time, the solution is to write about writers block; will it become unclogged or could it be just another form of procrastination?
- declan a. luketina
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