There’s always this ongoing battle in my mind about how to start a piece of writing — but I’ve recently found that this mental block isn’t just limited to me displacing my thoughts into your head. I find that I have a mental block in socializing at frat parties, in gathering up the ounce of courage within me to answer a question in a lecture and essentially in pursuing things I want to pursue. 

I find myself — a self-diagnosed perfectionist — struggling to pursue projects or being this Pinterest and idealized version of myself I’ve always desperately wanted to maintain. I find myself rewriting sentences over and over again — word-vomiting and rambling, cyclically and almost religiously. I find myself to be my most prominent critic: searching and observing the world around me rather obsessively to find the perfect thing to write about, the perfect thing to wear, the perfect thing to say or the most perfect thing to be. 

I may scour Pinterest boards, my journal entries and my iPhone notes. I may watch mind-numbing reality TV in hopes for an insightful thought to appear out of thin air. I may play the role of an outside observer, yet I must preface not as intensely as Joe from “You.” In turn, I often fail to recognize that the issue of my writer’s block is not that I’m running out of ideas but within. Maybe it’s that I want to skip the steps it takes to come up with a genius idea and articulate it eloquently. Maybe it’s that I’m so obsessed with being perfect, admirable and good enough at everything I do that I forget that we all start somewhere.

My writer’s block likes to translate itself into biting my tongue to prevent me from saying something that could potentially not be reciprocated. My writer’s block is translated into how I sometimes choose to wear clothes that I believe will be received well by others. My writer’s block is sometimes even translated to the word vomit that leaks into my sentences, and I try to overcompensate for my existence.

Often planting seeds of doubt into my mind, I may work hard, but my writer’s block can work harder. It’s like this mind-numbing buzzing headache of nothingness in my mind that overwhelms me with an endless amount of worst-case scenarios until I am found laying in my bed in agony rather than happily strolling along. 

Sometimes my writer’s block likes to win, or I let it. However, I did just write all of this down, so maybe it’s writer’s block: 0 and me: 1. Until next time.