The Issue

by distractingdelusions

This creative silence in my mind makes no sense. My words fail to appear, even as I think them, they vanish. I am left alone with the emptiness of the page before me. These white dunes of manuscript are barren,  devoid of their native, ink inhabitants. It is perplexing and perverse that my words should scatter to the winds with such ease when I require them to sharpen my mind and articulate my thoughts.

Perhaps that is the issue here. Perhaps my mind has become so dull and devoid of stimulation that the words have leaked out of me. I fear they have dribbled out of my ear canals like so much dirty rain water and soaked into my pillows and sheets in the night. I may never find them again. I do not know how to extract an abstract from a physical. The very idea itself is ludicrous. You cannot tame fog or air, therefore, how could I ever hope to tame and recapture those words that I have lost? Are they not as ethereal and vague?

Then again, it may just be that I do not know my mind as well as I believed. Surely the words I require to express myself still exist in some capacity inside this brain of mine. After all, I read more than the vast majority of people I know. One’s mind cannot become overcrowded with words. No. I am in no doubt that my love of reading has allowed me to accrue an expansive vocabulary. So why do they elude me?

Why do I find myself at a loss  attempting to enunciate even the simplest details when describing a person or a place? How is this possible? I am bewildered by my own ineptitude. Clearly, there are words inside this thick skull of mine. Why, then, do they persist in failing to cohere into comprehensible sentences?

I can only speculate as to the cause of my mental block. Perhaps (again, that word) it is my own lack of self-belief. Maybe I have mentally crippled myself by neglecting my creative impulses for so many years. Too many years wasted focusing only on the immediate, the perceived “real”. As if imagination itself cannot be considered as real and necessary as the physical world.

Still, this speculation is not helping. I am no closer to being able to capture a scene or conjure an image.
Again with the self-pity; how dreary. When did I become so facile?

“Woe is me, I can’t write anymore.”

How pathetic.

And now the self-loathing has arrived to complete the trinity: Stupidity, self-pity, self-loathing. A fool’s trinity of destructive emotions, tailor made to inspire revulsion in any social setting.
I am an ass for wallowing here.

That, I believe, is the real issue.