Every creative person hits a wall or a block from time to time. But sometimes those blocks become ridiculously huge, and your ability to chip away at them shrinks to nothing. Even worse, when someone or something is constantly building that wall, it becomes a losing game to keep smacking away at it. It’s akin to bashing your head against a wall repeatedly, thinking sooner or later your fractured skull will actually break the concrete.
What stops you? What internal or external influence adds bricks to that wall? How do you counter them?
For me, it’s being online. Going online is unpleasant. I’m painfully socially isolated, and want to interact with people. I acknowledge that, as a writer, if I want people to read my work, I have to interact with others. But it feels like any attempts I make are met with explanations of how I’m a horrible person and should kill myself. I get that at least once a day, and while the might of the block button is strong, my mental issues are stronger. I will fret over it all day, either assuming they’re right, I am a horrible person, and I should commit suicide, or I will be fuming at the person who said it for being just plain wrong in whatever assumptions they made that led them to say that to me. Or both. Well. Maybe frequently both.
That usually ends with naptime or some fresh scars on my arms. It almost never ends in me returning to the keyboard or accomplishing anything of relevance that day.
I don’t know how to block it out, or how to chip away at that wall.
Having just moved (and still fighting with my employer and SSI in a vain attempt to get paid, at least for the 9 months I’ve been unable to work, which they still want to fight even though I now have four different doctors all in agreement that I’m messed up), I can’t even hit up my go-to comfort food. There is no Popeye’s in Albany. This is a terrible crime that should be rectified, posthaste. If you’re listening, corporate overlords of delicious fried chicken.
Anyway. Back to the question at hand; what builds your wall, and how do you try to break it down? Let us know down below.
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