Hate

There are days when I honestly, truly hate writing. I sit and look at a blank document for hours at a time, trying to put something down on it, wanting so badly to take the words and mold them into something beautiful, and they simply will not let me. I'll write a sentence or two, and I won't like them, so I'll rewrite them, or I'll try something different, and over and over the result is the same, and I just end up with something I don't like and that I don't feel like I can continue. That blank page stares up at me, mocking me, taunting me with its potential, telling me about all the wonders that I could put down on it but refusing to allow me.

These days happen to me far more often than I would like to admit. It's like... It's like if I was writing with a pen, and even though I just bought it, and I know that it works, no matter what I do to it it won't let out any ink. It just absolutely refuses to write. So you start looking around, trying to find other things to do that might help you get the ink going, and all around you you see people whose pens work just fine, and you might even ask them for help, and all they have to say to you is "Just keep using it, it'll work. Look, mine does." "Great," you say back to them. "I'm so glad yours works. Mine just doesn't though. Can you help me?" "I'm telling you man, just use it. It works for me, I don't see why it wouldn't for you."

It's so frustrating to not be able to write. It taxes me more than you could imagine. It's like my brain, my creativity, my being is sucked out through my pores and pulled away from the page. I try to reach out towards it, but it's like I'm being pulled away by chains that come from nowhere and exist solely to prevent you from doing the things that you want to do.

These are the days that I question what I'm doing. Why am I making myself when I can't stand it? Why am I writing when it is painful, tiring, and so incredibly difficult? It keeps me from doing other things that I want to do, knowing that I still have to write, and I continue to put it off because I don't know what to write, and the longer I think about it, the less I have to write about until it comes down to a point when there is just so little left in me that I make myself write just anything that I possibly can.

These are the days when I write what feels like the same thing over and over. Even my sentences become repetitive.

But for some reason I write. I write, and I write, and I write, until there's nothing left to write, and then I write some more.

And when I look back on what I wrote, knowing all of the hate that I felt as I did it, knowing how much hate there was leading up to it...

All of that hate is gone. And I am happy.