Written by: DeAnna Erdmann
I usually love to write. From the moment I pull out the computer or grab a pen, words seem to flow out of my brain in pictures. I can see it in my mind’s eye, so I let my fingers type away to create those images on paper. I can typically sit back and smile as the adjectives drip deliciously, helping me to form beautiful imagery of people and places and things that I had usually never seen in real life.
Every now and then this horrid demon creeps its way into my brain, and it freezes my soul. I feel these crazy emotions well up in me and when I sit down to write it out, it’s as though something inside of me is being stopped by a brick wall. I try to dance around the wall beginning from different angles of how the emotion was brought on, but there are doors that slam shut or spillways that are bone dry. Trying to force my way down a dry concrete basin felt like taking a Brillo pad to the depths of my spirit and scratching away at the scabs that the emotions had formed. No matter how many angles I tried to scrub I was never able to even put a simple scratch into what I was feeling or seeing.
This demon twists my beautiful adjectives and makes them into gnarly monsters that limp and groan across the page. Their ooze becomes more of a distraction to my writing than bright and flirty colors. I often battle demons for nearly an hour. Dodging and ducking, swinging, and pushing to get my points across. It never fails, though, that I eventually sacrifice all my energy at the feet of the demon.
Emotionally bloodied, I surrender to the demon also known as the dreaded writer’s block.