I’m stuck
I like writing things, I like making things. At least I’m pretty sure I do. I want to write stuff, stories and essays and articles, and put them out into the world. I want to make games and clothes and cute little odds and ends. At least, I think I do.
But I’m not doing that, am I. I’m stuck.
It’s been a while since I sat down to write intentionally. Ideas come, moments of inspiration hit me, but they don’t translate onto the page. The bounce around my skull for a while, I sit, I turn them over, sometimes I even make notes. But that’s as far as it goes. And when I have managed to sit down and write, to make something, it’s rare I get very far.
Back around christmas I tried to get out some thoughts I had around queer theory, about gender and society and transfemininity. I wrote some stuff, a little under 3000 words, I showed it to a few friends as a draft to tidy up and incorporate some of their feedback into. I read some stuff that they recommended to me, made some edits, more or less completely rewrote it. And then more or less completely rewrote it again. And then just sort of… lost steam. And I never put it into the world, I showed a dozen or so people the 3000 words of my first attempt to really put those ideas coherently into writing, and that was it.
That’s not really an outlier, it’s how I go with a lot of my writing, fiction and non-fiction. Endlessly rewriting and editing, getting stuck tweaking the same little bits over and over. I’ve tried to write long-ish form fiction, but it’s rare I manage to write more than three or four chapters before I get stuck in the cycle of tweaking and tinkering until I drift off to something else. I’ve tried to write short form stuff, but it always either feels too insubstantial or doesn’t stay short form.
I’m stuck.
Do I even like making things? Do I even really want to? Do I actually have it in me to see anything through, to actually make anything at all? I try and I try but my brain always just… glances off. I get drawn back into the same cycles of re-doing the same bits over and over and over and over, forward progess getting slower and slower until eventually I have no passion or drive or interest left to keep me going. Except for those times, those few tantalising, terrible times, when the madness takes hold and the obsession consumes me for days. Except even then I’m stuck, eventually I hit the wall and I stumble out the other side with nothing coherent to show for it, too exhausted and broken to even bring myself to look at what I’ve half-made.
And so, I’m stuck. Stuck failing to make art, make anything. And now, I can’t even bring myself to start any more. I know how it’ll go, just another dead project, discarded in a state too rough and incomplete to do anything with, but too much there for me to just let it completely rest either. Even now they call to me, the ghosts of projects I left to die.
But I’m stuck.
Which brings me here, writing this. Writing with intentionality again. Being weird and fucky and raw and kind of autobiographical about it. Metawriting, writing about writing about writing. Deliberately pouring out a stream of conciousness because I’m stuck on it. See what I did there, that witty little bit of reframing. It’s so small, nothing all that special, but it’s the kind of cute cleverness I enjoy a lot, a statement that you can sort of stumble into and find meaning there. It’s hard, holding back the instinct to edit, to try to make the rest of this tighter and cleverer, to tinker till it’s full of cleverness like that, imbue a clear powerful vision tying it together. But I won’t, I mustn’t let myself, because then I’ll get sucked in, get lost in it, get stuck again.
But I digress, I’m here, writing this, writing with intentionality. Not the kind of writing I normally do, but that’s why this is probably going to go somewhere and the rest isn’t. Messy on purpose, rough and raw and half-formed, because anything more than that is too much. I don’t like that about myself, I have so many ideas I want to share and stories I want to tell and things I want to create. But I never do, I just get stuck. Something in my soul hungers for it, craves creation and artistry and all the rest, but it’s never borne out. So now I’m just adrift, sorrowful at what I’ve failed to do, who I’ve failed to be. I don’t know how to change it, part of me wants to think that by writing this I can move the needle, shift myself toward a better way of thinking about writing, approaching writing, approaching programming, approaching creation in general. Fix whatever it is that stops me finishing. But in truth I doubt it, I’ll finish typing this out, go and slap it somewhere, go do something else, and then slip back into my old patterns.
Because I’m stuck. And I don’t know how to not be.