the page is still blank

Sometimes it is so frustrating that no matter how long you stare at a blank page waiting for the ideas to come, nothing magically appears there. When I was in college, we would have writing assignments for poetry. This would be part of the reason I dropped out of college. I always accomplished the task at hand. I always did a relatively passable job of it, but something was lost in the process. I felt sort of like many bi-polar people must feel when they are medicated. It was all technique and not much of that deeper part of me which felt driven to write.

Since that time, I have never been able to fully recapture the drive I had before college. I write much less often. Granted, most of what I wrote before that time was drivel, with a few gems hiding in the rot pile. Now, if I don’t seem to be putting my finger on what I am trying to say in a way that I deem worthy, I am much more likely to abandon the project. The up side to this whole thing is that there are less horrible poems lying around that I cannot throw away. There is a down side though. The writing itself was therapeutic. Getting the emotions out through my words helped me not to tuck them into deep pockets of my mind where they would subtly affect every aspect of my life. Then again, I was a pretty depressed creature back then. Perhaps the writing just kept me from going over the edge of depressed into the realm of suicidal.

Now I sit and look at the page and wish that I could be a storyteller today. Things have happened which, at the time, gave me comic or angst-ridden inspiration, but I don’t seem able to hold onto the thoughts long enough to set them in print. I would suspect that I accidentally swept them away while cleaning, except that I haven’t managed to do much of that either. In fact, I still have the same darn load of clothes in the washer that I put there on Tuesday. I guess I should go wash them again.