I’ve had writer’s block for the past half year.
It sucks and it’s meant that I’ve missed deadlines and had to alter contracts and I doubted myself every minute of the day. It’s mostly mental illness and also some auto-immune disease stuff and I’ve been afraid to write anything about it because acknowledging it might make it real and permanent. (Yes, I realize this is crazy. I’m crazy. We match.)
But I start to slowly come back to having a brain that doesn’t actively want to kill me (I’M KNOCKING ON WOOD RIGHT HERE, LIFE. DONT FUCK ME.) and I can tell it’s working again because I wake up with words in my head. Like, literally a word will be stuck inside my mind. It taps around and says itself over and over until I write it down, and then I write more, and suddenly I have a paragraph.
It’s not a very good paragraph. It’s the first shaky walk you take to your kitchen to forage for food after a week of food poisoning, or the song that you can’t sing well because your vocal cords have forgotten how to work. But it’s better than where I was last week when I couldn’t remember a single melody and my feet went missing. This is a metaphor. Not a great one, but it’s a push that moves the rusty hinges and turns a useless broken wall into an almost door.
This might not make sense to you. That’s okay. Because it makes sense to me and that’s an incredible relief when you think your words are gone forever.
My words are still here. They’re trickling back in. Slowly, but I’m okay with that.
And to celebrate? A few of my favorite words:
Tintinnabulation ~ The lingering sound of a ringing bell that occurs after the bell has been struck
Gloaming – The moment of dusk that’s best for playing as a child. It isn’t so much a time as it is a place. You go for a walk in the gloaming.
L’esprit de l’escalier – (Technically not a single word, but it counts as one since it’s French and when I say it out aloud it sounds like one big, beautiful word.) The spirit of the staircase that tells you the witty thing you should have said when you were still in the conversation inside.
Cellar ~ It’s just pretty to say. You can smell the must, and feel the bright, wet cold on your face when you say it.
Baffled ~ me, all the time.
Unintelligible ~ You can’t say this word without sounding very smart. Unless you mispronounce it. Which is still fine because you can say you did it ironically on purpose.
Ethereal ~ I mispronounced this until I was 20. Even mispronounced it’s pretty.
Superstitious ~ This word is like a song. When I’m in a bad place I whisper it over and over, like a chant or prayer. It doesn’t have a meaning when I use it as a spell, but it pulls me out of my head. It’s hypnotic.
Hypnotic. I just remembered I like that one too.
Phosphenes ~ Those flashes of light and color that come out when you rub your eyes.
Dementophobia – The fear of insanity. The word sounds like falling down a spiral staircase…but gracefully.
Velociraptor. Happy. Discombobulated. Thundering. Vapid. Exploratory. Uninterrupted. Cylindrical. Elizabeth. Catastrophe. Bewildering. Grace. Kindling. Strangeling. Foundling. SWASHBUCKLING!
I’m back.
Your turn.