I’d studied a lot—an entire universe full of a lot—about *how to* write. But *not* writing was the truth of my writing experience. Not writing wasn’t the defining fact about me, thank goodness, or I wouldn’t be here. But I had unknowingly created a cluster of mis-perceptions about myself and writing that lived inside me as unappeasable ghosts, and left me struggling and over-thinking and not writing. I was tired of trying to figure out how to write. Tired of mentally struggling to make words up then pressure them onto a page only to later destroy them or leave them abandoned. I had lost the ability to write simply, with purpose and intent. When I determined to write again, I had a growing sense of how those internal perceptions operated inside me and manipulated me into not writing. But no matter how distorted my perceptions were, my experience of not writing was honest. It came as a wonderful surprise, a paradox really, that when I started exploring everything I was doing to not write, words came, and in a purposeful way, a way they hadn’t come before, and I wrote those words down. I took those purposeful words as a sign that this was it. Ether write this idea about not writing all the way to the end, or STFU already.
