I’ve been highly distractible all day. I’d pick up a book, read a few pages, then replace the bookmark and set it down again without remembering anything I’d just read. Once I read the same three pages in one book four or five times over without ever actually internalizing the words. I can’t concentrate.

Moving on. Another book, perhaps? Maybe if a book on writing science fiction doesn’t appeal, short snappy letters will. If not that, then reading fiction itself entertains, right? It’s a fast-paced book, full of intrigue and action, yet it cannot hold my attention for more than a paragraph or two. I put it down.

I stand up and walk over to my desk, trying to make myself fill out something from the small pile of job applications I’ve collected. No luck there, this stuff is just an endless repetition of writing the same things over in different little boxes. I pick up something else lying on my desk, untouched for weeks now: notes for the novel I worked on only a week before getting lost in school. Suddenly my interest in captured.

And yet, after a few hours locked up in my room scribbling notes, when I sit down at the computer to actually write something I find myself blocked again. The same thing I’ve encountered all month long: this wall.

You know what I did? I made myself write anyways. And as you know, my entire writing career has consisted almost entirely of learning and relearning that I need to write, and I need to make myself write, and the words will come if I get started and just trust that they will be there. The times are growing fewer and fewer when I have the inspiration, dedication, energy, and time to sit down and write because the planets have aligned correctly and I can write with no effort at all. I cannot depend on them alone.

Of course there were numerous interruptions and distractions along the way, but I persevered, and I’ve written two or three pages — which isn’t much considering what I can churn out in one sitting sometimes, but it’s more than I’ve written in a month or more.

I’ll need to write more to feel completely better, but I’m definitely feeling an improvement right now. I’ve been carrying around all this pent up creative energy with no outlet (not to mention guilt for not writing when I have so much free time) and now I’ve finally been able to release some of that. I feel good about myself today.