I called it Writer’s Block

But it was really fear.

Reading Liz Giblert’s Big Magic taught me something very important about my life and about myself.  Yes you learn something from most books, but when I learned this important lesson from the accomplished author, tears welled up and I felt a cathartic release.  Someone understood me.  She understood, on a very real and personal level what I was doing to myself.  I am not alone in these feeling.  In fact, there are many people like this all around the world.  It was incredible.

Before reading her book about creativity and living a creative life – which she calls big magic – I would have told you that the reason I was no longer creating art, working on poetry or doing anything else that involve self expression, was that I didn’t have the time and if it would be too much to get back into it right now.  I would say that if I sat down and attempted anything it wouldn’t be my best and therefore I wasn’t going to take the time for it.  I would use perfectionism as a shield, or better yet, a mask.  When it came to writing, I would say call my paralysis writer’s block.  I would say that the ideas just weren’t coming and that it was going to take time.  I didn’t realize just how much time it would take.

In Big Magic, Liz Gilbert says that something that is extremely profound.  I forget her exact quote, and my copy is out on loan currently (see our book club)…but she says something very similar to: perfection or the desire for perfection is often fear masquerading.  It wasn’t perfectionism that was inhibiting me from living creatively.  It’s fear.  It’s the fear that what I create will be judged, if by no other person than myself to be lacking or deficient in some way.  Fear is persistent and patient.  It will wait you out and remain for the long haul unless you send it packing.

I would have permanently suffered from writer’s block if Liz Gilbert hadn’t given me its true name, its true nature: fear.

The pressure to be perfect, to avoid embarrassment and all of the other negative emotions that result from rejection paralyze us.  The inhibit us from doing something natural, something that makes us human: creating and expressing ourselves.  This pressure, the fear, it’s all learned.  We aren’t born with it.  As kids we create prolifically and share it with anyone and everyone near to us.  Overtime we condition ourselves to harbor this fear and after some time we fail to create at all.

If this fear is learned, then it is not inherent or natural and that means that it can be unlearned.  In other words, it means that we can condition ourselves to live without it once more.  Shedding this fear takes much effort.  It takes consciousness, to detect when and where the fear comes creeping.  And it takes patience and gentility, to treat ourselves kindly as we work to understand and then release this fear.

Coming to this realization, I was probably in one of the worst places I could be…on a packed bus, on my way to work.  It felt like something washing over me.  My eyes welled up with tears and I felt a cathartic release, almost a desire to cry all that fear away.   It was a realization that I am meant to live creatively, and that my unhappiness and stress was a result of denying a piece of myself.  It was a realization that I could shed these negative feelings, that they were not a permanent condition.  It was a realization that with time and a good bit of work, I could let go of that fear, maybe not fully at first, but enough to be able to create.

Acknowledging this fear enables you to forgive yourself.  Forgiving yourself readies you to identify the causes and the beginnings of that fear, and this consciousness prepares you to let these feelings pass.  Already I’ve started reworking the idea I had for my first book and have been gifted with the idea for a second book, which I’ve actually started writing.  I am writing.  I cannot believe how it good it feels to say that.  My ideas, my books, they may never go anywhere, may never be read by anyone but myself, but that is not the point.  I am meant to express myself and have found a medium in which I enjoy doing so.  That is a beautiful thing.

PS: It is my hope that this second book idea will turn into a beautiful novel that is read, and better yet, picked up by a publisher.  I plan to share my journey here, and hopefully one day, an announcement that it is finished.