On writing...

Academic writing, or, really any writing is something that I find incredibly painful and always have as long as I can remember (all those tears shed over school papers). This is a problem because my career of choice is built around writing as a way of expression. Writing is this sort of voodoo thing for me - filled with ritual, painful effort, overwhelming weight of the knowledge of others that may be involved in the creation of current prose and general terror of getting things wrong. There is meaning, weight and the expectation of others' opinions that is embedded in the writing and in the outcome. As my career progresses, I am spending more and more time trying to write... but not really accomplishing much.

Why? I had expected that no matter how hard writing appeared to be, once I wrote my whole dissertation, writing would become that much easier, my own gained expertise giving me confidence to write. Writing, it turns out, is more about self-confidence than anything else. So I wrote my dissertation, hating every moment of it. I wrote it, defended it and got handed the degree. Then I took a job where I was hoping to spend time writing and rewriting my dissertation for publication and soon I discovered that academically, writing-wise, I had become mute...

Over time in grad school I hadn't realized that I had built up a series of rituals and a collection of spaces where I could, finally, write. It wasn't in my office, or my desk at home, but my couch or a particular table in a specific coffee shop. My writing also had to happen in the afternoons in the coffee shop or after 10 in the evening at home, and absolutely required inordinate amounts of tea. The spaces in which I wrote had to have a particular kind of mess around them - the books and papers that were related, stacked in uneasy teetering piles by the couch or piled on the windowsill of the coffee-shop. Rarely looked at or read, but there as a form of moral support and instantly visible anchoring.

In my new home, I couldn't seem to find the right space to write... The couch was too uncomfortable, the desk too large and somehow not right, the coffee shops with a vibe that didn't match. So I grappled and grasped at something, trying hard to figure out both a space in which I could write and a way to quite my mind, to settling it down so it could help me produce text. I seem to have summarily failed.

My self-confidence about my expertise is not present, it is at an all time low as I try to broach less familiar literature and ways of thinking. So I madly read and find myself unable to integrate, process and figure out the spaces in which I can contribute my voice. In some strange way, I had lost my voice and became speechless, effectively mute. I flounder as I worry about saying things that may be seen naive, obviously unaware of existing knowledge and just plain wrong.

What to do? Reading more does not seem to help, but maybe acknowledging that I need my rituals and I need to create or identify a space that can help quiet my neuroticism about writing. Acknowledging that for the most part I am being neurotic and unable to write simply because I don't think I can say something interesting enough or new enough is only good if I can get past this. Can I? We'll see.