Working through the blockage

My inner voice is speaking to me quite clearly. It says, and this is no whisper, get any old shit out or this gig is up. This is my fourth draft since August. Things seemed different back then, in some ways there was a hope that we might learn to live with whatever this thing is and find some sort of normal. I suspected that we would be living in a hinterland and with no end in sight but I was feeling my oats for my new found love of the written word and my drive to seek out words seemed like a wall of protection surrounding me. I did not believe for one instance that this time, I would be gaping dry- mouthed with nothing to say- this time was different than the others, this was the first time, for example, I had lived and written through a global pandemic.

But if there is one thing I have learned, you are who you are and real change is a position hardly ever won. Those who change have the fortitude to chip away at the bedrock and foundations - not chosen but left behind; they don't give up on seeking it out and carving it up, choosing to see it as a cancer. When I was younger I had a dream of disappearing into a missing poster and leaving all behind and starting afresh. At one point I thought I could disappear and remerge psychologically but that's the thing about psyche it springs back like a boomerang chucked in the bush. So I am working hard here (bear with me) to chuck any old shit out and hope it does not bounce back.

It is not as if I haven't written, I have made words and had things published in my local paper, but the fact that I need no qualifications and there is no bench mark, does nothing for my wounded psyche (damn it keeps coming back). The objective for writing a lockdown journal has been met and in many ways concluded. We are, the government tells me, no longer locked down*. We may leave our houses and it is deemed safe to work (although when I get all casual and breathe normally, they remind me my breath is toxic and I should not be behaving like it is in any, way, safe). Here I am, living a life, punctuated  by weather and seasons and work... My daily life is hardly of interest, so what does that leave me to document? 

Get any old shit out. My inner voice is pretty loud at times. Sometimes, there is no plan - no beginning, middle or end and certainly no theme. After any period of time where you cease to do whatever it is that you think that you should be doing, there is no self-help or positive quote or technique to 'do better' or even to 'perfect your art'. There is only doing, or not. It is either something you want to do or be, or it isn't. Sometimes you have to own your shit, let it leave and pray it does not return with gastroenteritis. 

*written before the national lockdown for four weeks was announced. 

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