There are cupboards in my home into which I
shove things that are too hard to think about. Consequently, I live in fear of
opening the doors in case I'm avalanched by the enclosed mess. Now that the
closed doors of winter are being thrown open to the warm spring air, I've been
thinking about the many things to which I need to apply the notion of ‘spring
cleaning’—besides my cupboards. One of these is my writing. Like many, I suffer
from winter blues. The lack of light and the cold sap my motivation
and energy. There are days I can’t put my fingers to the keyboard or pen to
paper; when the doona seems life’s best option. The last few weeks have been particularly difficult.
A perfectionist by nature, I bring to the blank page the weight of my
expectations. Before I've even begun to write, I'm worrying about whether the
work will be good enough, who will care and what if I can’t do it? It’s easy
for all these thoughts to spiral quickly into what’s the point? After that kind of thinking the search for the
doona begins in earnest.
In response, I started to explore these creative
downs. Through reading the work of Eric Maisel, I discovered they are not entirely
seasonal. He makes the point that both creating and not creating provoke
anxiety in creative people—it’s intrinsic to the creative process. Taking one
of Maisel’s ideas, I’m employing a new strategy which is to document my writing
anxieties by keeping an ‘anxiety awareness journal’ for the next month. While I
seem to be unable to produce new work at the moment, I can certainly bleat about
the fact, even if I'm my only audience. Given that creative people live with
anxiety for many reasons and at many levels, this method aids in identifying and
challenging the specifics of what is behind the procrastination, fear, blues or
any other word you want to give the ‘not writing’.
I recognise the irony of writing a blog
about not being able to write. Perhaps acknowledgment does start the road to
recovery. So, that’s my plan but before I begin, I need a cup of tea, a biscuit
and an hour or so to edit my cupboards...Hey, at least I'm in writing metaphor mode.
