I am in a peculiar and uncomfortable headspace at the moment and it’s making writing poetry difficult. A few weeks ago, after a particularly rough writing day where I produced a poem that better identifies as drivel, I found myself overwhelmed by and then trapped with the idea that every poem I’d write from then on would be just as terrible. And they pretty much have been.
Every morning, I wake up feverishly excited to write a poem, but in the same heartbeat, unbearably fearful that I’m not going to be able to get anything of value down. That fear accompanies me to my desk, where it effectively eats my excitement, plunders my productivity and has my imagination running for the hills.
I’m left punching out poems so uninspired and awful, I wince when I read them back. This makes for an exhausting and thoroughly upsetting experience, especially because the poems I’m trying to write are about subjects so tightly woven into the fabric that makes up my humanness, and because writing about these subjects had previously been as natural as breathing.
The fear I’m experiencing doesn’t extend to the writing of my blog (thank fuck) and I find I can come to Wyrd Words & Effigies after a day of immense struggle, and usually get what I need to say out. After I’m finished here, I’m going to spend some time thinking about ways I can challenge this destructive mindset.
The plan for today’s post was to share some things from my notebook. But I’ve taken a different approach this time around and made some ‘motivational notelets’ in Canva from some choice quotes I’ve copied down recently. Reading them all again this afternoon has been an effective dose of counselling. I hope, if you’re struggling with an aspect of your writing life (or even if you’re not) that they can offer you something too.
Celebrating the strange and the shadowy, the damned and unseen 