For two straight days now, I’ve been trying to write unsuccessfully about why I sometimes feel lucky that my two attempts at settling down with someone, “marrying” and having kids failed. I hit a wall after about two paragraphs. And besides, I could never craft a sentence I was happy with.
It felt like I had lost the “writing muscle”.
I think this is the problem with any hiatus in production. In the past, writing had been a constant companion. In fact, writing was the only true companion. So, when I had the sudden urge to pen down a random stream of thought after coming out of a weekly or monthly bout of voracious reading, words somehow flowed. If not, at least walked briskly out of the mind onto the digital paper.
Now that it has been a long while since I wrote something considerable, the urge to write isn’t matched with the ability to do so. And that, dear friend, is a massive disappointment.
I can’t resort to calling it the “writer’s block”. That affliction is reserved for those who are true writers — who write every so often that it may be only hours between two consequetive writing sessions. This is worse. This is ignominous. This is just a block — more like becoming incapacitated thanks to sheer laziness.
That I finished two well-written books full of interesting words, beautiful artistry (in semantics), and a timeless appeal did not help. If anything, it only aggravated the problem. The hubris works to absolute detriment: Kindle in hand, you swish past sentences and paragraphs and chapters, and you get these interesting one-line pointers to base your next write-up on, and you assume you will be able to jot it down in one-go in flowing, flowery syntax, only to find out — as you waste a few hours staring at the screen, and a few more typing and erasing over and over — that you have fooled yourself into thinking that you can write.