I Move On, But the Writing Stands Still
What will I do when the words stop?
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There are days where the words refuse to come.
At such moments, I begin to worry. It starts as a seed of unease in my stomach, the pit embedding itself deeper and deeper, till I feel like there’s an anvil trying to pull me down to the ground.
“Oh, that’s just writer’s block,” you may say. “You’ll get over it.”
Or maybe you’re a non-believer in writer’s block and want to tell me just to work through it.
I would respond the same way to either end of the spectrum: “But the words have left me before.”
I remember those dark days when the hum of inspiration went silent. I don’t recall much from back then. Some days I stared at walls for minutes, hours, who really knew. I felt as if I were a withered shell of myself, any buds of hope dying on the branches before they even had a chance to become something with more permanence.
I couldn’t see a road ahead of me. The fog took over. If the words had been brought to life, they would have been doves flying away toward a horizon I felt I could never reach again on my own.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
And even then, in the back of this white noise of a mind, I worried the words would never return to me.
That was how my one and only stint with the realm of antidepressants went. I became so entrenched in a hole that I couldn’t even begin to see a way to claw myself out. I believe in the intervention of medications (particularly in how they may aid in mental health situations), but for me antidepressants were a resounding NO from the way they seemed to deaden my brain.
Over the months that followed, the return to writing was akin to rehabilitating myself after an injury. There were weeks where I would just stare down at a page and berate myself for not being able to make anything flow out. It was frightening. It was exhausting. It was humbling.
A part of me vowed to myself that, if the words did come back, I would never take them for granted again.
With the help of having to write regularly for college courses I was taking, soon the words began to trickle out again. It…
