Sunday, January 29, 2012

I am a writer...

(Just a random stream of consciousness I wrote while at work yesterday.)


                I can feel the terror building in the pit of my stomach, a small dark knot made of nausea and self-doubt.  I don't understand it.  I can't understand it.  Have I lost my will to write?  I'm staring at the keyboard with a stomach full of butterflies, paralyzed that I've burned myself out.  I don't know what to do.
               
I can feel it burning inside me, like acid in my veins, this desire to write, to get these words out in digital ink on virtual paper.  To feel my fingers flying over the keyboard.  To relieve some of this desperate ache.  But instead I fall into this same rut, over and over and over.  Open the file, stare at the blank page, and become furious with myself for sitting so firmly on this writers block.
             
    And they scream.  Oh god, do they scream and rage and curse at me, demanding that they be the next to be released upon the world, that their story is the next that must be told.  They refused to be sated, they refuse to be silenced and I'm starting to think that the only person who is not inside my head is me.
             
    I know them by name.  I know them by spirit, by attitude, by what fraction of my psyche that they represent.  Bryna and Brin, duality.  Jessica, desire for freedom.  Daniel, desire for justice and the power to enforce that justice.  Disperia, desire for vengance and escape, for rage and violence.  Mordred, desire for acceptence and adventure.  Nichole, desire for control.  Jebzebelle, desire for complete abandon.  DJ, desire for understanding.  They're all there.  All bits and pieces and fragments of the whole that is me.  They're all me.  Every one of them, and every one who will ever develop.
            
    So if I know this for a fact and for truth, why do I sit here with my guts tied in knots, staring at a blank page?  This is me, this is all of me, and I am a writer.  I am the champion of the written word, a smith of language and prose.  I am a writer, blessed or damned, and there is nothing that they or anyone can do to prevent my voice from being unleashed!  Critics be damned and especially the worst critic of all, myself.  Slit the throat of my inner critic and leave it to bleed it's inky-black blood all over the cosmos. 
             
   You cannot stop us.  You cannot silence us.  You cannot muzzle the muse or sew shut the lips of the speaker.   I am a writer and writing is what I do.  It is all that I do.  This menial day to day drivel to pay the bills means as little to me as the dirt beneath the soles of my shoes.  It is a means to keep a roof over my head, pens in my hand and power to my laptop.  I am a writer.  This dead end flourscent-lit hell is simply a means to an end.
            
    I don't expect to be famous.  I expect to get my stories written, to unleash my characters upon the world.
            
    I am a writer.  That is all I am and all I ever shall be.