This just sucks.

I debated posting this for a long time. But it is honest, and it is how I feel, and if people are going to judge me for it then it still doesn’t erase what I feel. I’m debating even more reciting this for my True Story assignment in my Drama class. I didn’t even intend to write this when I sat down, I just wanted to force something onto a page, but it came out, and I think it is good material for the story … but maybe a little too personal and less action-based than most people would want. But here it is:

Maybe I should just be honest with myself for a change.

I don’t even know what to call this anymore.

It isn’t writer’s block, it isn’t even really anything. I just have no idea what to write.

When I looked at a blank page … or a road sign … or a single sentence, a single line of a single poem … it used to be an endless realm of possibility. I’d just look a certain way, sideways on to the world, and it was like flowers expanding in my head, files upon files opening and connecting with very little effort on my part. It was like Roddy’s flower files or Lyra’s alethiometer: something that was so natural it was like breathing, something so easy I wouldn’t have to think.

Of course getting it all written down took work, and for years I couldn’t write anything longer than a few pages. But that didn’t matter so much, because there was nothing I couldn’t spin into a story, take and shape with words. It was so easy.

It was one of the reasons I got so angry in English class. I was a writer, it was how I thought of myself, and nobody wrote things down thinking of how they’d sound later. And if they did there was a certain tone: confusing, self-satisfied smugness. Sometimes authors pick based on what flows better, what communicates the details of the story better, what sounds better to the ear.

Then came the epic bout of writer’s block.

I’d heard of it happening before. Writers suddenly being unable to write for months on end, even though they desperately wanted to. And then when they could write again … nothing. Emptiness. I’d had writer’s block before, but never like that.

It hurt. It hurt me more than I knew it could. I had to face the possibility of a life without writing, and I knew I couldn’t do it. Whatever I’d been telling myself about giving up my dreams of being an author and going to law school was total lies. I could not physically do that.

The world got dark. Whenever I thought about the future, it hurt me. It just looked bleak and dark and lonely. Without the comfort of my imagination, without those thousands of possibilities spinning forth, unfolding from even the most ordinary of objects, what was there to life that was worth living for?

I made an effort for my friends. They didn’t understand, but how could they? They’d never defined themselves so deeply by one thing, without even realizing they were doing it, and then been unable to do it. And they tried, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to be able to write again.

Today the sky looks lighter. I think that everything will be okay. But I still don’t know what to write. All I get when I look at the world sideways-on in that way I used to are brief flashes, and then they are gone. The rest is white and empty.

But I will find them again. Like Lyra, even if it takes a lifetime, the magic that was mine in those unreeling possibilities will be mine again. Even if it takes a whole long life. Because without it, my life would not be worth living.