What’s that I hear you say? Working with your struggle? It’s ok, I can hear you all from here thinking (out loud too), “How on earth can you work with your struggle?” And I totally hear what you’re saying, I get it. But let me tell you what happens when you do.

Do you ever have that feeling where you are completely consumed with the need to write? Yet nothing leaps down your two arms and into your fingers waiting diligently, hovering over the keyboard?

For the last two days, all I’ve wanted to do is write, and write and write. But nothing would come. Nothing was flowing.

I tried everything to revive the direct line from the brain. Walking, singing, dancing, doing the washing, eating citrus fruit. I will admit that I wasn’t 100% convinced of the line of thinking on the last one. I think perhaps I hoped that the sweet acidic juice from three mandarins would burn through the obstacle preventing my brain from enabling my hands to dance across the keys. Even the morish deliciousness of dark chocolate laced with sea salt couldn’t muster a spark on the embers of my writing.

Desperation

Feeling forlorn and devoid of ideas still as I awoke this morning, borderline despair drew me to the search engine and to enter “good blog topics”.

That was it, that was the final straw. I simply had to draw a line through that idea. It wouldn’t be my voice you’d hear in those words, it wouldn’t speak of who I am.

So alas I am writing this; my experience of how the once open and flowing river of connection between my heart, brain, and fingers, is clogged by, well, God knows what at the moment.

I’m thinking it means that I need to be on the move again, I think it means that I need to perhaps go somewhere where the difference of place and culture serves as a circuit breaker. Where the reset button can reactivate my seemingly depleted writing brain.

Right now as I am writing this, I feel as if the struggle is becoming less and less. For the past two days, I’ve tried to fight it and it made no difference at all. Actually voicing and sharing the struggle is what is seemingly breaking the cycle. My mind is now awash with ideas of where to go. I’m thinking perhaps Morocco; I’m thinking of places that contrast those I’ve visited up until now. A fresh perspective. A different experience that shapes my way of observing, my way of capturing, my way of writing, and enriches and gives another layer to my writing voice.

So the point is this, if you are literally struggling to write or voice something, then write about that! Talk about it, record it and put it out there. It’s part of how to purge yourself of the difficulty and allow space for the new, for the fresh, for the next page of you.

What block or struggle is bothering you at the moment? Let me know!