In which my "world's least efficient writer" tag has never been so relevant.
So I've realized why, yet again, I'm not writing anything: it probably has something to do with the way that, rather late last night, after finally fighting off every procrastinatory option the Internet has to offer, I got a scandalously small handful of words down on screen and fell right back into the hooooooooorrible black sucking howling void of anxiety.
You know the one. With me it actually is a falling feeling, sort of vertiginous; the ground disappears from underneath me, my stomach ties itself in knots, and the voices start howling in my skull. You know. The voices. Rough transcription: "this is shit, the person you just showed it to hates it, everyone is going to hate it, everyone who says nice things to you has been lying, how dare you be under the delusion that any assemblage of words you could conceivably put together could be funny or interesting or, let's face it, recognizable as being in English, stop being so fucking impressed with yourself, you're never going to get anywhere, and, really, you're never going to finish this, either, so why not play another twenty-five rounds of Bejeweled Twist and forget about it?"
Of course, the thing to do when the voices hit late at night is to take your melatonin, put on a Big Finish audio, and declare it bedtime, which in fact is what I did, but they are... not a time-linked phenomenon, let us say. And this is every time I try to put a word down. Every time. No wonder my brain's gone into gridlock and refused to start producing; it's sheer fucking self-defense.
And the ridiculous thing is: I have no idea where this is coming from. No other person has ever, to my recollection, been that hard on anything I've ever written. My absolute worst experiences were with a handful of teachers who took the "you know you can do better than this, and no, I'm not going to tell you what I mean by that" approach to everything I handed in -- and, in hindsight, I can only really accuse one of those of being malicious. (She didn't like kids who needed assistance. Or whose parents got involved. Or who called her attention to the fucking massive bullying problem her classroom had going.) I have been astonishingly lucky when it comes to meeting people who want to encourage me, which needless to say includes all of you lot, and you are wonderful.
I mean, this is where we have to accept that I am just that organically broken, because there is nowhere for the call to be coming from but inside the house, you know? And I don't know what to do about it. The proper answer is probably to keep pushing on through the pain in hopes that I'll eventually become desensitized to it, but the thing about pain is that it fucking hurts. And when I start wanting to cry and lash out at people over my own obvious inadequacy, I do not feel tremendously motivated to keep going. You know?
And I probably ought to bring this up with my therapist at SOME point? But I don't see her that often, and when I do I have so many more pressing things to talk about, like, things with a bearing on my actual real life. It's not really relevant, this, is it? I mean, it really matters very little what I do with my non-school time, in terms of actually having any kind of future, because I've never planned on being able to make a living writing. Even origistuff. Never mind that I have a related problem with school assignments, because when it comes to that I only need to learn to just sit down and grind it out...
&c.
And, for those of you with no interest in my self-loathing, a fabulous interview with the fabulous Anna Chancellor. They don't ask the question I desperately want answered about The Hour (I'm sure those of you who've seen it can guess what THAT is) but I think I'm in love anyway.
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