self portrait

I am terrified of the blank page, and all it implies. Every morning when I first sit down at my computer and I pull up a word doc to start working on that days pages, I wind up staring it vacantly for what feels like a brief millennia. I have ideas, I have the desire to create, but none of my words seem to look right on the page, and the monolithic pressure I put on myself to GET IT RIGHT OR NO ONE WILL THINK YOU ARE THE SMARTEST AND CLEVEREST PERSON ALIVE reliably crushes my spirit, and I go to read blogs and news and look at pictures of girls for 2 hours or so, and then before I know it my day is ending.

When I sat down today to write this mornings post I though a bit about that blank page and how much certainty and confidence it takes to conquer the blank page nerves. I thought about the creative visualization meditation we used to do in martial arts and how it always started with going to mu shin, the state of no mind, the blank page. We would clear our minds, to free ourselves from context, from expectation, and just exist in that moment and then once we were free of everything but ourselves, we would let our thoughts go where we wanted them too. And I want to do that with my writing, but it never seems to work. And now I'm thinking that for fiction that works, but for anything you want to put some genuine emotion in, you have to have to sheer force of will to sit at the blank page and forget nothing at all. You have to realize that the blank page is not everything, it is nothing, and if you know who you are and what you want to say then all you have to to is say it. For your work to have meaning and clarity, you don't write from mu shin, you don't free yourself from context, you write from every moment you have ever experienced, you and you alone ARE THE CONTEXT, the words are just a reflection of who you are and your position in mental space and time at that moment. and more than anything lately , I want to have that confidence to know who I am and what I want to say, and start making marks on the page.