As my loyal reader will have noticed, I didn’t post anything yesterday. I did think about republishing an old blog in order to make it look like my creative juices were still flowing, but that just felt wrong. And having made numerous false starts, I called it a day early last evening. For those many millions of you buying me a coffee, I am sorry I let you down, presumably leaving you bereft. Imagine how I felt.
Call it ‘writer’s block’, call it anything you like, but the fact is for us literary superstars, the whatever-it-is that brings forth the prose simply wasn’t there. In my case, the more I think about what I am writing, the less writing I do. And there are always the noises off.
Real world events matter. And the real life roller coaster seems to go on forever. One minute, I am having one of the best days of my life at my oldest son’s wedding, exactly a week later my youngest son gets his highest ever score when playing for the village cricket team, featuring a towering straight six that ended somewhere in the nearby housing estate. In between, I find that almost everyone I know seems to have cancer – happily, this isn’t the case: it just feels like it – a village legend died of a combination of heart problems and dementia and, for once, I left the food bank at which I volunteer (have I mentioned this before?) feeling kind of flat and disillusioned. Sometimes, life itself can feel incredibly complicated.
On another day, I lost my Fitbit and broke my watch strap trying to find it. These traumatic happenings occurred just after our water pressure dropped so badly our shower wouldn’t work, so I had to have a bath at a time when I was already in a rush. It was, at least for that brief moment in time, the end of the world as I knew it and I didn’t feel fine.
Having had an anxiety-riddled meltdown to add to my ongoing depression for one moment felt like The End. And I cannot deny that my ailing mental health was veering relentlessly to self-pity, or at least that’s what it felt like, and that’s where the guilt started.
The guilt, that is, that comes from feeling a bit, or even quite, shit when others are feeling a lot shit. How dare I feel so sorry for myself when, by comparison, my problems are seemingly minor. And yet, and yet.
When someone is poorly or going through hard times, or even both, and they say something like, “There’s always someone worse off!” I respond by saying this is clearly the case, but they must not look at their own problems in comparative terms because no matter how bad someone else’s problems are, theirs are still there and won’t go away just by thinking someone else has it worse. Apologies for such a long and clunky sentence there, but I hope you get the drift. It is possible to be less poorly than someone else and to not feel bad about it, but try telling me that. The guilt is still there.
I am not even certain that events had any bearing on my inability to write anything yesterday. On the face of it, it felt like a normal Saturday where I did the sort of things I normally do on a Saturday. Maybe it was just a normal brain fart, an aberration. Or maybe it was an over-cluttered, over-thinking mind clouding the view?
What I’ve done today is to write about why I didn’t and couldn’t write anything yesterday, which on the face of it feels like a cheap way of writing something to ensure I don’t publish anything two days running. Even the non-stop high volume barking of next door’s fucking dogs hasn’t stopped me writing today, so I feel I may be back “on it”, as football pundits say when a team is playing well.
We all have good days and bad days, including us writers. I have to say that I still get off on the fact that I relish the idea of sitting in front of a blank screen and seeing what happens. Yesterday, nothing happened, today this blog did. Hopefully, the next meltdown can wait.
