Writers Block Psychosis: On Being a Poet and a Honky
I am in physical pain. Here is my stream of consciousness.
I don’t know what has happened to me. Prose and I used to kiss each other on the mouth like lovers separated for too long by the sea. Now, Prose acts like it doesn’t even know me! If writing was a man, my friends would make me burn his photo in the yard and go to the bar about it. But, alas, writing isn’t a man, and my friends don’t even know that I am trying and failing to write a novel that my heart has a hard-on for but my brain won’t release.
Right now, writing feels like bashing my fucking head through a window, and every time I rear back to take another whack, the window magically repairs itself, and I am bleeding out. Except I’m not bleeding out. I can’t get a goddamn thing out. If I was bleeding out, then I could at least put blood on the page.
But everything is stopped up.
I can feel it in my forehead.
Down my back.
In my fingertips.
I was reading Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands La Frontera recently, and she talked about a similar experience with physical pain in relation to writing, but she was able to release the thought after placing herself in DIY sensory deprivation. This interested me, and I wanted to try it, but I kept hearing something in the ceiling. The vaguery of something in the ceiling obviously caused me a bit of distress, and in my mind, there were two options:
I had finally lost it, and I was developing schizophrenia.
There was a man in my ceiling or a rat or a man-sized rat.
Luckily, I was able to find a gigantic fucking hole (the size of a baseball at best and a softball at worst) on the exterior of my house that is too high for a rat and too small for a man. Thank god, it’s a bird. Or at least a bird-sized man. Good news aside, I still can’t deprive the senses when there is a bird directly above my head doing the exact thing I do not want to do (regurgitating used material.)
In true freak-out fashion, I have the urge to blame everything but myself.
So, let me start with blaming poetry. For the last two semesters, the only creative writing courses I have taken were poetry writing and then advanced poetry writing. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. In fact, I begged my advisor to put me in advanced poetry writing instead of Brit lit. Photo evidence:
Generally, I really do enjoy writing poetry, but it has made my world microscopic. I know, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Just zoom out!” I’M TRYING!! At one point, I was told my prose was like “a mixture of Mark Twain and Nick Cave.” Now, I am the patron saint of purple prose. I can’t write a goddamn thing without spending three pages zooming in. (Reference: the amount of time I spent on what could be in my ceiling.)
The next thing I would like to blame other than myself is my consumption habits. I read this Substack post the other day:
In this, Olivia says, “I would rather consume with the hunger of a wolf than create with the sharpness of a butterknife.” And, like…yeah, exactly. This led me to think maybe I am trying too hard to produce, and maybe I need to consume for a little bit. Which led me to remember another Substack that I love:
I thought, damn it if I am going to consume in this fashion, it better sharpen my sword. So, I went on a subscribing-to-everything-Caitlyn-from-milk-fed-recommends bender. I posted via notes earlier this week:
This note was a direct byproduct of Caitlyn’s recommendations. I also started reading every Substack article that even kind of piqued my interest. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed all of the things I watched and read…I even enjoyed the article entitled “Gooning: An Expose,” but they were doing absolutely fucking nothing to stoke my fire.
Is there something inherently wrong with me?
Is the bird-sized man in my ceiling poisoning me slowly as an attempt to get me to never write again?
Maybe…but probably not.
I realized today that the problem is that I cannot even begin to relate to 99.9% of the things I am consuming. I live in the rural part of a rural town in an already rural area. My paternal family are loggers (all of them.) My maternal family are cowboys (all of them.) How could I possibly relate to a video of a girl in NYC talking about high fashion? For reference of what I look like day to day please see this photo of Hunter S. Thompson for RollingStone:
I had this same conundrum around age seventeen. I remember vividly being in a “dark academia” Tumblr group chat (cringe + throwback), and everyone in it was talking about the classics and their favorite combination coffee shop bookstores to haunt. Now, I am aware that many of these other misunderstood youths were just trying to suck off Henry Winter, but at the time, I had never felt more outside the outsiders. Not only had I not read the classics, but my town didn’t even have a bookstore. I wanted so badly to be intellectual, but reading these messages from real intellectuals while I was here:
I had never felt like more of a honky. It took me a long time to realize (then, I guess, forget and realize again) that art and intellectualism surround me, but the kind I get to be around is unseen by the masses unless in a folk tale.
What I am getting at is I feel a need to reconnect myself with the worlds that built me. To write the things I am good at writing, I need to focus my consumption on things that inspire me. While I have gotten enjoyment out of so many things outside of my bubble what I am basically saying is:
And I need to go home.
If you have stuck around this long. Thank you. My forehead and my fingertips feel lighter, and would you believe it I can’t even hear the bird anymore. I might even be able to get some work done on the novel I am trying and failing at. Which, for the record, is a logging story (they exist outside of Paul Bunyan…although I do love Paul.) If you keep reading, you will find the unedited first few paragraphs of said logging story as a treat for seeing me through my psychosis.
An excerpt from In the Pines, By Emma Peterson:
What does it mean to ascend to complete and total divinity? To be chosen and to slay the beast with such finality that it snuffs out your own flame. Will it simply fade to black, or will we begin again? I didn’t think about these kinds of things as a boy. I know that some kids do, but it wasn’t until I was burdened with the crushing weight of adulthood that I began to wonder. Wonder what makes a man and what makes a devil. I eventually came to my conclusion. A man is made of flesh, blood, and bone, but what really makes him is his freedom. His freedom to live and his freedom to die. Both must be at his own discretion if he truly wishes to make a man out of himself. It wasn’t until my freedom was taken that I decided to take the freedom of another man. What makes a devil, on the other hand, is quite similar, which will come as a surprise to no one. To be a devil, you must be a man willing to take freedom from another for personal gain. What I did was for no personal gain but a righteous act in which I made men out of every man I knew.
It feels strange to deconstruct a bomb after an explosion, but that is what I must do to serve as a light to those who follow. The warden allows me this time to deconstruct the bomb. Partially because they think it will help, but mostly, I think, because his father was a timber man, too. So I sit, and I deconstruct. Bit by broken bit, I repair the explosion of my mind to paint the full mosaic picture. It is my hope, I suppose, for my reconstruction to be displayed. Not in the Louvre or any other gallery with smoke blown so far its own ass that you can’t see the image. No, this picture is to be hung on the walls of the mind of anyone who has known, has loved, or is a caged man.
After deconstruction, it is important to begin the reconstruction before the fire burns low. To begin doing so, it is imperative that I start from the day I first shook hands with the devil.
Happy Sweet Thursday (Tuesday),
Emma, a poet, and a honky.
P.S. got a notification about this note while I was editing this, it felt fitting.
Can confirm: she dresses like pictured Hunter S. Thompson.
This is such a relatable write up. Many of us want to journey into new parts of the world with our writing, but end up finding out where we come from ignites the fire.
Those first three paragraphs are such a tease! We want more!