Un-Writer's Blocked, At Long Last

originally published by Limeaid (now defunct)

I haven’t written for Limeaid in a while – in fact, an entire semester. This is a fact that makes me genuinely sad. I love this organization, I love being a part of it, and while I’m covering a number of domains for it now, writing is my first and favorite thing to contribute. And yet, I haven’t been able to provide anything.

 

I’ve been writer’s blocked. Not just simple writer’s block – irresolvable writer’s block. Destructive. I’ve been writing since I could construct sentences, and before that I’d create stories and scenarios out loud. I’ve always been human, though. Sometimes for a week or even a month at a time I’d be unable to get anything of quality out of my system. Usually, this was a phenomenon I could overcome. I could sit down with a good soundtrack, or tap into an emotion, and something would pour out after a while.

 

That’s what I thought back in June. I submitted a prose piece to a literary magazine and writing it had felt like pulling teeth. That’s not to say that writing isn’t supposed to be painful. My best work tends to hit me like a truck. However, this wasn’t an emotional sort of pain. It felt light-headed, weak. I had to wrench it out of me. July came and the Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing; I figured my writing would spill out of me now, since I felt so passionately about what was going on and I had so many ideas. But no dice. I got a single article out and my well of creativity was rendered sufficiently dry. 

 

Still, I’ve had rough spots before. I told myself, “Now, it’s just a waiting game.” It’s not like I was lacking strong emotion to channel – even beyond COVID it’s been a tumultuous year for me. My grandmother, who I’ve been close to my entire life, died of complications due to Alzheimer’s in April and due to the pandemic, I have not been able to gather with my family and mourn properly. Relationships in all sectors of my life began to shift and change at a rate I had difficulty processing. Being unable to leave the house was certainly taking its toll on my intense extraversion. A play I had labored and cried over had gotten rejected after months in the judging circuit. 

 

August came and went and brainstorming wouldn’t even work. I sat staring at a blank Google Doc, just hoping for a stream of consciousness to brew some ideas. Nothing. Not even a sentence-long pitch! It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

 

Writer’s block was all I could think about, and I figured with a rapidly changing and stress-filled world, it was something that other people could certainly relate to. So I strung together a 500-word-or-so article about it, about being easy on ourselves and our creative production during an unprecedented time. It was a nice sentiment, but it was also the shittiest article I had ever written. It’s normal to have a piece torn up in the editing process, but let me tell you, it was loaded. The editors were kind, of course, but it was a feeble attempt at artistry, and we all knew it.

 

I dropped that article. I couldn’t even look at it. It was embarrassing to me. So I continued to wait, even as my mental health tripped and fell. After all, writing’s been an emotional outlet my entire life. Even as I struggled with anxiety, at least I had somewhere I could put my emotions and have them make sense. That outlet was gone, and I didn’t realize how stringently it tugged my sense of self until literally months later.

 

Two of my classes offered flexible, project-based finals – I decided that there wasn’t anything better than a deadline and a grade to force me to get my creative act back together. In response to my spring surge in playwriting, I decided to write two different plays. I made this easy on myself; one would be based on a favorite scene of mine from The Iliad, and the other would be a mid-century ode to Italian-American culture. Both of these are familiar, sentimental topics to me. 

 

I brewed for days and I outlined, hoping to experience that inspiration burst for the first time in a while. Still nothing. So, I retreated to what has worked in the past for long-term projects: I made specialized, curated playlists to get my mind going. This was fun and helped at least for the Greek one.

 

The Italian-American play was a little more difficult. I had to turn in this assignment for a music class, so it had to be at least somewhat researched. I began to get frustrated. I just didn’t know what to put on this tracklist. I knew what my grandparents listened to a little bit, my grandfather being Italian-American and my grandmother Irish-American but fully assimilated into Italian culture. Without filtering, a thought burst through my mind: “Man, Grandma would know exactly what I should be listening to.”

 

It hurt. But it hurt correctly. With everything going on this year, and grades and relationships and a lifestyle to maintain on top of it, I realized in that moment that I had not allowed myself to comprehend the more difficult parts of the year. I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve, not truly, and I hadn’t allowed myself to be sad about other aspects of this rotten year more than what I felt was disciplined or justified (so, not very much). 

 

Writing, as an emotional outlet, requires you to tap into those emotions to produce material. While I had intentions of creating, I built up walls to prohibit access to some of the choicier, more vulnerable feelings in order to protect myself, so I could stay efficient and level-headed. I felt it square in my chest in that moment – I understood. And suddenly, the words made sense to me. I restructured the Italian play; the main protagonists would be an ode to my late grandparents, and one of the main protagonists in the other play would become a space for me to sort out my rising and falling feelings of interpersonal inadequacy. 

 

I wrote and finished two plays in a week.

 

Now, I have returned here – to Limeaid. To creative nonfiction, in my own voice! To readdress that horrendous writer’s block article and to return to a regular writing process. And most of all, to let you know that it’s okay, genuinely, to take time when it comes to creative production. It’s been a god-awful year for everyone, and that comes at a price. If you can’t get anything out, that’s one hundred percent understandable, because even when you feel like this is it, that you’ll never get anything worthwhile into the world again, I promise you will.

 

You just have to feel it, and it will make sense. We are all in the same boat. We’ll come out of it together, and with some beautiful pieces to share.