Cracks in the Dam

I stare at the blank pages. There is so much on my mind, yet it is so difficult to put them in black and white. My heart trapped inside my feelings… my head, rationalizing, in a vain effort to drive those bitter, scary thoughts away… conflicted, confused and yet, with all outward appearances of sanity and cheer… as if life has dealt me nothing but the best hand!

My pining increases exponentially for the things I most certainly will never be able to have… a family, someone to call my own, unconditional love and acceptance. And yet, I push away every opportunity of getting something even close to that. I am jealous of even the most unfortunate of people around me… because they have something that I can never, ever have. I realize that some people care for me and want to fill the void, but I am scared to let them. Sooner or later, I tell myself, they will drift away, and the void will rush forth to consume me once again… isn’t it better to just get used to it and mourn, than to forget it for a while and then remember it all over again?

I remind myself of a dam sometimes… when the rains are bountiful, they open the gates. Or else, the force of the walled up water will cause cracks in the walls, and soon the entire dam will come crashing down in a flood. I feel my defenses around my dammed emotions starting to crack. But I am afraid of opening the gates… will I ever be able to dam up again?

Appearances have to be maintained. The show must go on. And so I tell myself, emotions and feelings have no place here… Dam them up, and keep up the show. But then I hear whispers. Whispers that I have the best of everything. Whispers that nothing could beat owning a million. Whispers that it makes no difference that I have none to share it with. How I long to tell them that just doubles the pain. How I long to tell them that I would give all of my millions to just have someone to call my own, someone to come home to every day…

But what’s the point. Who will understand my pain anyway? Empty words, and heartfelt pity – that’s all that I will get… not enough, not nearly enough to cure my writhing heart. And so, I write. I don’t know why. Perhaps in the vain hope that someone, someday, will understand the pain hidden beneath these words… or maybe, just to open the gates and let the tears flow.

Writing About My Writer's Block

All right. I have officially developed “writer’s block”…

I have been working on this “come back” piece for ages now… thank god for e-age, or else several trees would have found themselves axed, martyred to the cause of completion of this epic piece!

Well, I have nothing to write about. No genius plots come to my mind these days, and rhyme and/or reason seem lost. I have even run out of steam with my ramblings! And yet, tonight I am determined – I will churn out something!

So here I am, writing about not being able to write any more… eggs and brickbats notwithstanding.

They say, (and I am not very sure who “they” are) pain is a writer’s elixir. Creativity is born out of pain. Of that, I have had a considerable amount in the last few months. I expected my pen to start over flowing, but nothing happened. I found myself even more clammed up than usual. A shrink would have a million explanations for that, I guess. I don’t want to face reality. I don’t want to acknowledge my losses. I am scared of the intensity of my emotions. Maybe. I really do not know whether any of that is correct. Or incorrect, for that matter. These days, I am not certain of anything.

Many well wishers have been advising me to get married. I am scared. And if they had been in my shoes, they would be scared too. If you cut your finger on a broken mirror once, you tend to handle all mirrors with more caution than usual, because you don’t want to cut yourself again. The same goes for your heart, doesn’t it? Nothing in my life works out the way I want it to. Who’s to say marriage will?

Of late, I am aware of a growing affection towards a person. And I am afraid of it. I do not know whether he feels the same way. I do not even know whether I want him to feel the same way. Neither do I know whether I want it to stop or go away. I am scared and confused. Not to mention emotionally drained and battered.

So much uncertainty and pain. In my life, my mind, my thoughts… the pain has reached an extent where it is now an integral part of me. A way of existence. I do not feel anything separately. In a way, I am numb. Perhaps that is why I cannot write. For creativity to be born out of your pain, you need to feel the pain. But I don’t. I can’t, anymore. I am numb.

There… now you know the reason for my writer’s block!

So now, maybe, we should concentrate on how to get over it. And here comes the funniest part. Pretty much wasted and jobless, I was typing out random senseless queries in the Google search engine, and “how to get over writer’s block” threw up “about 8,880,000 results” in only “0.17 seconds”! Wow!!! And I thought, well, I have the writer’s block, and if so many people around the world have written about writer’s block, why not add my name to the list?! So, what follows below are some of the funniest things I read among the 8 million results thrown up by Google… of course, I did not go through the 8 million results – more like 80, but there were more than enough funny ones among them to get me through this article!

Funniest, perhaps, is the fact that there exists a website that “unconditionally guarantees” to break your writer’s block forever, if you buy the package offered on the site! One afternoon of your life is all that the owner asks for, in addition to a considerable sum of money, to give you some extremely well-guarded secrets that will ensure that you “never fall victim” to writer’s block again in your life! Wow! What confidence!!! Beyond that, I reserve my comments…

On the Yahoo! Answers page, someone has asked about how to get over writer’s block on a particular story, and another user has replied, “Read, write”… Yes, that’s it. Verbatim. Just that. I was stunned by this excellent piece of advice!

There was another response on a similar query on Yahoo! Answers, and I wanted to kill this user for writing, “Turn the block into a sculpture because writers block is an illusion.”… GRRRRRR…

On yet another website, the author recommended gathering topics / plots from Twitter – “find out what people are talking about” and then write about it!! Oh goodness, what a divine cure for writer’s block!

One person recommended downloading OmmWriter – supposedly, my sickly blue background of MS Word is aggravating my case of writer’s block!

One person actually suggested writing about writer’s block to get over it!!! He also suggested having a peppermint candy… strangely enough! He reckons it stimulates the brain cells… of course, he didn’t quote his source for that information!!!

Well, the effect of these articles was quite good on my writer’s block. It must be evident to you too, because I did manage to churn this out, didn’t I?! Voila!!! Bye bye, writer’s block! It seems, in my case, outrage and sarcasm work better than mind-numbing pain to get those creative juices flowing!

Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, yes, of course I found some good articles too on battling writer’s block. But taking a leaf out of them, I will write another article on them, so as to officially put my writer’s block behind me!

So long then, fellas…