Is it really writer's block?

On acceptance

Self Acceptance I, Lesley Oldaker, 2018

Recently I’ve had the cluster of symptoms that people call writer’s block: a mind that seems to shut off the moment it sees a blank page, a body that feels quite gastrointestinally opposed to producing any kind of sentence, and a spirit that would rather do just about anything else short of self-immolation, thank you very much.

The term writer’s block is sort of like the word depression, in that it’s a catch-all descriptor of an experience whose causes can range from ‘I’m Hungry’ to ‘a rubber band ball made of centuries of accrued, mutated, and metastasized Freudian traumas’. We also make the same mistakes in our response to writer’s block as we do depression: we assume it’s a bad thing, then we try to treat the surface-level symptoms rather than the root causes.

The root cause of my historical bouts of writer’s block has usually been perfectionism. This time, when I found myself staring at a blinking cursor for the third week in a row, it struck me that something felt different. It seemed as if my body was telling me not to write—like it knew something.

When I finally stopped trying to override that primal voice and instead listened to it—a lesson I will perhaps learn before I die—I heard something interesting: “This is not a time to write. It’s a time to live.”

Huh. That sounds vaguely profound, Oh Wise Internal Voice, I thought. It made more sense once I thought about it. The past few months have been a whirlwind of wonderful experiences that I have been savoring. It has been a season of sinking into sensation, of total immersion, of, as Shinzen Young puts it, sensory conductivity. My attempts to step out of that immersion have felt unnatural.

The modern world does its best to strangle the seasonality out of our lives. But there’s a limit to the extent that we can override nature. It is our nature to ebb and flow; to work and rest; to write and live. We are seasonal creatures.

For me, for now, it is a season of living. That is a beautiful thing. At some point, it will again be a season of writing, during which I will process and metabolize all of this raw sensory stuff. And that will be a beautiful thing, too.

There are ways in which it is wise to impose our will on the world: sending the scary cold email, telling a love interest how we feel, finding that side door to make something happen. Agency is the key to locks we didn’t even know existed. But there are also ways in which we would be wise to surrender. When we surrender, for instance, to the rhythmic seasonality of life, to the particularities of our nature, to the outcomes that the fates see fit to orchestrate from the actions we take, we stop fighting the flow of life and swimming against its current. This tends to make things easier, more effective, and more fun.

Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—experiences like writer’s block, depression, and failure are just the negatively valent names we give to the flow of life when we don’t like the direction it’s going. And sometimes, the best response is to hop on a raft and ride the rapids.