But emotionally perhaps I have let their shades stalk my mind and my thoughts.
It takes a lot to stop me from writing. And sometimes it takes nothing very much at all. Most of the time it is simply writer’s block and I have been through enough of those kinds of episodes not to be overly concerned when they strike. It’s best not to fight them but to just ride them through. Take a holiday. Take a break. Recharge those batteries. Sometimes they last years but if that is the timescale that is dictated so be it. Sometimes it’s nourishing to catch up on other stuff and live a little bit. Ultimately writer’s block is usually a good thing.
Sometimes, though, I am stopped from writing by the actions or opinions of others.
And I hate myself when that happens. For allowing it to happen.
Because most of the time when I write I feel big and bold and will fight my right to write freely with every tiny flourish of my penmanship. But sometimes stuff sneaks in under the fence. Scores a hit under the radar. The attack gets personal.
As is often the case these attacks always occur when you are a low ebb anyway or when life dictates that now should be a time of trial and tribulation and you find your back breaking under a rain of “final” straws.
In such times I do not so much as stop writing but feel myself to have been stopped.
And as I said, I hate myself for succumbing to that. For feeling that suddenly it is simply not worth the waves of negativity that some people are intent on unleashing. Worse, the waves of misunderstanding, presumption and arrogant conjecture that some people dredge up in themselves which leads them to believe they know enough about you and your life from the little you choose to write about to be able to judge and condemn you and your life as a whole.
And worse still. They condemn the very need to write. They belittle and besmirch it. They don’t entertain that it is a freedom and a right or an aspiration in itself. They condemn it as some kind of pathetic, ego-driven, desperate need for self-validation and sycophantic approval from others. They make it into a pewling inconsequential whine for attention; an inflation of the trivial and mediocre; a caterwauling of personal opinion and emotion that for some reason the writer himself is suddenly not entitled to as a human being even as the complainant stamps their own ill-founded opinion and emotion over every available surface.
Suddenly your find your throat stoppered and your voice silenced. You don’t so much edit yourself as perform a murderous hatchet job on every idea and possible source of inspiration before your mind can even get them through the foetal stage.
And that part of you that since you were a child has burned with the need to write suddenly finds itself caught up in a sealed vacuum and the flame has no choice but to go out.
Or so you’d think.
John Lydon once sang “anger is an energy”.
Well, in the absence of oxygen it is also a fuel.
I’ll write what I like, about who I like and whenever I like.
This blog is an ego thing. That much is correct. It is about me and my thoughts, my feelings, my memories and my opinions. But they are not the complete sum of me. This blog will never be the full picture and you will never know the whole of me or my life from what I write here. You will simply know what I write here. And I do that because I want to and because I have a right to.
The picture below has done the rounds on Facebook a couple of times now but each time I see it I republish it on my own Facebook page. It is very apt. And very true. And, ideologically, is currently where I stand.
If you have a problem with that then you need to deal with it. Write about it yourself, sound off to those closest to you or just shut up and suck it up and wallow in your own negativity. But don’t dump it on my blog, or my family, or me or my right to write.
Because, aside from a momentary pause, I shall just carry on writing even more.
