A Pity Party? For Me? You Shouldn’t Have…

This is a mixture between an apology/excuse post for pulling off another unexpected vanishing act and a rant about my current headspace. All in all, probably the one post a blogger should never write. But we don’t exactly follow the rules in this little corner of the internet. Clearly.

So I’m going to break another rule and christen this an official virtual Pity Party.

It’s going to be great. We can sit in an imaginary circle and listen to each other’s sob stories without actually caring because we’ve all got our own bigger problems to worry about. Unfortunately, there’s no food. But if you’re worried about staying hydrated, I would suggest drinking your own tears.

I’ll start. Hi, my name’s Amy. (This is where you all go, “Hi, Amy,” reluctantly and with a hint of sarcasm.) *Takes a deep breath.* I’m an eighteen-year-old white girl from a privileged background, but I’m feeling overwhelmed because my life is so difficult and the expensive university I’m attending doesn’t leave me with enough time, energy or creativity to attend to my other hobbies, which include complaining loudly into cyberspace, buying books with money I shouldn’t have, and chasing imaginary creatures around town on my iPhone.

*Exhales.*

That’s it, actually. That’s my whole excuse for being missing from the blogging world for a couple of months. University is difficult and time-consuming. What a lame excuse, am I right?

Luckily I have another one saved up. Because in my three weeks of vac when I should’ve had ample time to read and write, I wasted precious hours drafting non-creative reasons for not getting my sh*t together. Yeah, I’m pathetic. I know.

I’ve never believed in writer’s block. Honestly, I just thought of it as an excuse that people used when they felt lazy or low on creativity. Not having anything to write about was a bizarre concept I’d never experienced, and the prospect of not being able to write was a strange one. (Being the kid that has always preferred to spend time in her head, where life was a lot more eventful than the real world, I had no shortage of fantasies to document in an ever-present notebook or journal). And not wanting to write? What was this madness?

But that’s what I’ve been struggling with for the past few months. Not the lack of material (there is always an endless pile of books I could review), or the inability to write (I still have all my fingers and most of my brain, I think). Rather, there’s this crippling sense of not wanting to put my thoughts on paper. It’s crazy. I’m crazy, right?

Don’t answer that.

In any case, this is about as close to writer’s block as I’ve ever felt. Every time I pick up a pen or open up my laptop, it’s like I’m watching the words float in front of my face, but I don’t have the energy to reach out and arrange them into sentences. So I just gaze at them aimlessly, kind of like how you’d stare into a fish tank at a dentist’s waiting room. Except that the fish tank I’m seeing is filled to bursting with these luminous, distorted fish that make my eyes hurt. And I know that if I just took some of the fish out of the tank and nurtured them in a better tank, they could grow into something beautiful, but that would require effort, and I just want to get my appointment over with.

What a twisted, messy comparison. But you get the picture, right? Like, if the fish are potential ideas, and the tank is my brain…

Yeah, never mind. It got weird.

Anyway, that’s the strange limbo I’ve been in at the moment: knowing I should write but not wanting to, essentially. And that sucks, because writing is one of the few things that helps me keep a grip on what’s left of my sanity. Now it’s just giving me a headache, because I’ve let myself get away with pushing it aside for so long.

But hey, look at that. I managed to write this whole post down and it didn’t kill me, so maybe I’ve suffered through the worst of my slump and am slowly starting to pull myself out of the weird hole I’ve been hiding in. Progress, right?

(And people say I’m not motivational.)

In reality, what I really need is this:

Seeing as this is a Pity Party, feel free to use the comments to complain about whatever the hell you want, free of charge. We don’t judge here.