I’ve heard while growing up about this thing writers would encounter, “writer’s block”. I thought it was made up–something ridiculous, something privileged white men said to excuse their boring and uninteresting lives, to mask their ever striving to be great, to make a “breakthrough”, to write a masterpiece for literature. What would a privileged white dude understand about telling a story about the universal suffering and challenges of humanity?
As a kid, I never understood it. I didn’t want to believe it existed. “What’s wrong with you! Just write!”, I thought to myself. But with decades past, I’ve not only come to understand it, I’ve become intimately plagued by it. These days there always seems to be a massive block when I sit down to write. The tension, the angst between this deep feeling, this knowing that I need to write pushing up against the massive block of loneliness. I was locked in a cage I didn't even know I was in, a cage I created.
That old line of thinking exposes my jealousy, my unforgiveness. And it was directed towards men, particularly straight white men. Such a tragedy. My own frail and corruptible humanity blinded me in not only seeing others as they are: just people, humans, as equally frail, frightened and corruptible as I was being and still am.
This blindness not only hindered me from seeing their humanity, it kept me caged, trapped from seeing my own flaws. I was ever fixated, ever trapped and suspended in a world rooted in pain.
And what was that pain: rejection, self-hatred, rage, abandonment, betrayal, living in a world of broken promises.
Calling out these poisons, naming these dragons of hate, judgment, and unforgiveness is what’s helping me set myself free. These are the poisons I need to reject to rejoin the world of people. It allows me to engage with others powerfully; and in so doing I’ve empowered myself to reclaim my own humanity, to be fully human and to be truly free.