When My Words Fail

I've been a writer since the first time I pieced a string of words together and made a coherent sentence.  Sometimes I'm a good writer, sometimes I'm a great writer and sometimes I'm an okay writer.  I'm rarely a bad writer, but I'm sometimes a blocked writer.

I kept diaries as a kid, but even then I knew enough about the Crazymakers' modus operandi to understand that words of truth kept in black an white were evidence, and that evidence is what gets the scapegoat convicted of crimes - hers or someone else's.  I destroyed diaries as quickly as I wrote in them - just another built-in safety measure I suppose.   Still, it was never the act of keeping the words that provided me with release, just as it wasn't the act of sharing the words that made them real; my therapy came from - and still comes from - the actual writing of the words.

To pull an abstract concept, feeling, emotion, scenario, situation, theory or idea from the ether and use words to coalesce it, to make it black and white, to create worlds and reality out of those concepts; that's my huckleberry, baby.  The act of creation is what I need.  The act is what counts to me, moreso than the audience or even the impact.

Lately, due to all sorts of different distractions and demands on my time, I just don't have the words.  This makes me sad.

I've placed myself at the keyboard many times over the last few weeks only to be stymied by my lack of creative energy.  Like Jack, all work and no play is making Vanci a very dull girl indeed.  Dull might not be the right word, actually, I think what I've been feeling is stifled, maybe even oppressed. 


And whoo boy, that's a freakin' familiar feeling for me as an ACoN.  So, tired leads to blocked, to stifled, to oppressed.  True to my nature, of course, that oppression leads to ... make.  vanci.  angry.

This cycle becomes a sort of self-perpetuating prophecy for me.  The claustrophobia of being unable to express myself eventually works its way into a blinding rage.  Like I said, make Vanci angry.  And when I'm angry, well, that's just ugly.  Perhaps after so many years of the happy happy make nice game that I was forced to endure, or maybe due to the lack of emotion I was allowed to express, when I get to angry these days (not so often) it's a destructive period of time for me.  I can't create when I'm so busy destroying.  And if I can't create, well, everything gets backed up and I become my own oppressor.

So, this is me, putting it out there and making it real by telling the truth in black and white.  I'm hoping that setting it in this stone of font helps me to move past it and maybe the mojo of this post will bring the words back in force.  At the very least, now that I've said all this, I feel better.

Love,
Vanci