My mind is the abandoned space these days
My mind feels like an abandoned hospital. Perhaps an insane asylum or whatever the PC term is these days before I get cancelled and shuffled off into purgatory. Windows are broken. Paint is peeling off the walls. The floors are covered in dirt, grit and grime. And in every room, there are piles of fascinating yet painful looking equipment that is mostly broken but still cool to look at.
All my life I have been a writer. My head full of stories that I couldn’t get out fast enough, but for the last three years I have struggled to finish a sentence let alone any of the number of books I have started and stalled on. It’s terrifying to think that I may never write again. The fear hits me like a sucker punch to the jaw, sending me reeling and crying to the floor. The self-loathing that hits in the next wave is like the violent sickness that often accompanies a big night out. It’s unavoidable now and you just have to ride that wave of doubt, clinging to the toilet bowl of your existence with clammy hands while your head thumps in the distance.
When did this downhill run begin? I can’t pinpoint the exact time and location, but I’ve been on this slippery slope for a while. At first, I you think it’s just minor writer’s block, then it becomes a phase you’re going through. Finally, you start to ignore it and give in to hope that the urge to spill words on a page will come back to you soon. It hasn’t. This is forced. This is like tearing out every hair on my head one at a time and piling them up in a neat little candy-floss heap.
I talk to my psychologist, who says go easy on yourself. You’re working through a lot. Well - yeah, I am but, in some ways, I wish I had never started, and I had stayed in the cesspit of denial I was living in forever. The nasty, dark, dank pit in which I hid all the mean and awful things my family ever did to me. Where I kept the reasoning that allowed me to explain all the bad behaviour away and constantly forgive them even though they clearly didn’t give a rat’s right testicle about me. Still don’t. Not really. It’s all surface area with them, and though it was like getting knifed in the forehead, I finally had to admit to my secret sad self that I was suicidal. Not just becoming. Actually there.
Something had to give. It had to be the words, which were now needed to describe in hour-long detail just what the f*ck had been going on for the past 40+ years of my existence. My imagination, my stories, my writing was my blood sacrifice. My creative mind feels dead inside. Empty like a porcelain dolls head and just as fragile. I’m always tired and out of sorts. I only hope I can get it back … I’m going to keep trying.
