Not Writing

I’m struggling.  Meds are all messed up and my doctor had to change an entire schedule of treatment because things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to go.  Which is depressing in and of itself, but the meds not working also CAUSES depression and instability, so… extra awesome.

But on top of that, exacerbated by that, and… an ongoing unresolved issue is… not being able to write.

And yes, I’m writing right this very minute.  Look at me writing.  Problem must be solved.

But this isn’t writing this isn’t going to that place inside of myself where only writing has ever taken me.  And I don’t know how to describe it.  Maybe it’s like artists who need to make art.  I don’t know.  I don’t know what it is.  But it is something I had all of my life… and it’s been cut off for years now and I am feeling increasingly as if… I am losing the purpose of my life.

And that sounds dramatic and stupid and of course my life can have purpose without writing… but… maybe it can’t have enough.

And every time I try to talk about this I get responses like… “But you DO write…”  or “If you want to write, just write…”  or “You have to be okay with the fact that you don’t want to write right now…”

No, I fucking well don’t have to be okay with that fact.  That’s like someone saying, “You just have to be okay with the fact that your body doesn’t produce insulin…”  No, I fucking well don’t have to be okay with that!  I need it fixed!

But I don’t think I’m expressing to anyone how deeply dangerous and damaging this is.

And even when I do talk about it, a voice in my head tells me it’s my own fault because if I really wanted it, I’d just sit down and do it.

But… when I do sit down and do it, like every night on this blog, and when I write and produce writing and create and…still can’t access my real writing self it is worse than not writing at all.  It is like standing in front of the glass wall and scratching against it and not being able to break through rather than turning my back and at least not having to SEE the wall in my way and FEEL it blocking me.

I talked to Sir about it tonight.  He can force me to physically write, but he can’t break the wall for me.  And I hoped that physically writing would break the wall on its own, but it hasn’t been happening.  And, in fact, when I do have moments where I get close to breaking, the wall gets twice as thick as it was before and my goal moves even farther from my reach.

And I don’t understand.

I feel that I maybe have little bits and pieces of the puzzle… perfectionism, anxiety, depression… but I don’t have enough pieces to make a picture clear enough for me to problem solve.

And I feel there is nowhere to turn for help.  All the conventional writing wisdom says… Write!  Write badly, write daily, write in a journal, write on a blog, write to prompts, write with a time limit, write without prompts, write at the same time every day… write.

Nobody has any advice about what to do if none of that works… or what to do if writing is killing your soul, and not writing is, too…

There is just trite “if you really want to write, you will, and if you don’t, then you don’t really want to.”

So… I guess I’m just a freak.  The only person in the world to be trapped against the glass.

I don’t want to write.  I am compelled to write.  It is a craving inside my body every day.  I am jealous of my own students as I give them journal time every day and watch them writing… and jealous of their freedom and jealous of… their ability to… just write.  Not write well, just write.

I am being pressed up against this glass wall by compulsion, by a need that won’t go away… and neither it nor the wall are giving and I feel that my spirit is being crushed in between… I feel my need to live eroding.  Not as dramatically as bipolar, which just pulls my survival instincts out from under me on a whim… then returns them with equal capriciousness.  This is a slow and steady wearing away, layer by layer, so that even when bipolar returns my ability to believe in the future… it is a future shaved thinner and weaker and less and I’m afraid that eventually it will wear too thin to sustain me and I won’t need bipolar to stop living.  I just won’t have any desire left.

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