2022-08-18»
no wordsยปI’ve been having a bit of a rollercoaster time at work; nothing you need to bother your giant head about, but this week has been a mix of incredible highs, and also some really hard introspection.
One of them, which will seem silly to regular readers of this blog (who are the only ones left right now, and I’m not even sure what “regular” means in this context), is having to admit to a co-worker that I have terrible writer’s block and have had for… ooh, thirty years or so? I remember reading somewhere that “writer’s block didn’t exist” and I think that added another couple of decades to my refusal to really take it seriously. That and at least two book deals, careers in scriptwriting and journalism, and a perpetual sense that I was failing at the one thing people expected me to do.
Well, you know, I have taken it seriously — lots of therapy where we’d eventually get around to it as a topic, that whole “lifehacks” side-tour, endless agonising and bending the ear and wetting the shoulder of my closest confidants. But I’ve never really said it in a work context as a thing that people need to watch out for.
Mostly, I just say I will try to do better. But I really don’t; this is who I am. To give you an example: these days I’m practically a walking Oral Tradition — I don’t write memos at work, I give hour long internal talks, and fill up meetings with these improvisational marvels of ad-libbed wisdom that amaze me, even as they probably bore or annoy a sizeable chunk of my co-workers (though they are all really nice about it).
Of course, I’ve had that thought where I just go, hey, maybe I could just speak to a microphone, and transcribe all of this genius and magically turn it from mid-brow hand-waving into high-status prose. Somehow it doesn’t work that way.
Anyway, usually this kind of post ends with me dedicating myself to you, regular reader, and promising to blog more, or what have you. Followed by another six months or more of silence. I know enough to know not to say that now, and bring down the curse. But I guess what I am feeling is a sense that even if I don’t write it’s time to saddle up again and try and push the ideas out there, with a keyboard, or a prosc arch or livestream or something. It’s never too late to start, and it’s always too early to end.