Writer’s block is a fairly common ailment amongst writers, but my problem seems to stem not from not being able to put words on paper but from a fear of rejection of the words I want to put on paper. Actually, that’s the root of so many of my problems, but for now I’ll just deal with writing.
I started a blog a few years ago, before this one. It was based around workplace safety, which I felt – due to my employment, experience and qualifications at the time – suitably qualified to discuss, at least in terms of how it related to my own sphere. I was completely unprepared for a very unpleasant attack from a reader who said I was spouting crap. It seemed strange, to me, that I had quite a decent following on WHS pages on LinkedIn and we had some very feisty and productive discussions, but here was someone I’d never encountered, a complete stranger reading my blog, who felt they had the right to abuse me. I didn’t know how to take that rejection or how to respond – especially when I didn’t think I’d said anything untoward – so I killed the blog.
A while later I started this one, specifically intended as a reflection of my own personal opinion. It’s never had a large readership, but I’ve never publicised it much. Originally it was only somewhere for me to rant and sort of like a diary I could keep for my grandkids who I never see. It’s only very recently that I have started putting the posts out on Facebook and Twitter.
Then in December 2012 my world changed, and the reasons are covered on the website I created at that time, www.itsokaytobeangry.com , and the accompanying blog http://www.itsokaytobeangry.blogspot.com.au/. It was a hugely confronting thing to put something so personal out into the webosphere where anyone could read it. I took a calculated risk.
The third blog, http://www.aneurysmaphorisms.blogspot.com.au/, came about after I was diagnosed in July 2013 with a brain aneurysm. I decided to diarise my experiences because there was so little information provided to me at any stage of the initial diagnosis and consultation process. I share the posts with others diagnosed with or surviving brain aneurysms on Facebook and have helped to stimulate some conversation about the condition, which is excellent!
Yet every time, before I start writing, I get a sort of writer’s block which has nothing to do with not being able to come up with words but everything to do with how people will respond or react to my words. I hate rejection, I fear rejection, I don’t know how to handle blunt rejection to my face. It has to do with my own history and the fact that I seem to have been fighting rejection of one form or another my whole life – my “windmills”.
I was called a drama queen once by a woman who knew nothing about me. I found that term very offensive – I still do. Recently I was catching up with a friend that I haven’t spoken to since before my aneurysm diagnosis. When I rattled off the stuff that’s happened to me this year, she asked “Holy crap woman – do you go looking for life’s challenges or do they find you?” No, I don’t look for drama in my life, it just finds me. Something that other woman years ago never understood – or wasn’t interested in.
Not everyone has a happy, normal, uneventful life. I wish I did. I wish, with all of me, that I didn’t have all this crap, that it didn’t just find me, because the constant rejection that has gone hand-in-hand with all the stuff that has happened over many years has made me fearful of putting myself out there again and again. I don’t want any more rejection, I can’t deal with any more rejection.
Then I remind myself, when I started the It’s Okay to be Angry website and blog it was with a specific purpose in mind – to provide help and support for other women who had been through that aspect of what I’d been through, to know that I understood their feelings of anger and betrayal.
And I remind myself that when I started Aneurysm Aphorisms it was also with a specific purpose in mind – to document my journey and provide information for the thousands of others “out there” with aneurysms, because I was so frustrated with the lack of information readily available to me.
Then I start typing. By this stage I’m not worried about rejection any more. I have gone full circle back to where I started, sitting at my keyboard with a topic in my mind that concerns me or means enough to me to write about. So I will write about it, and I will put it on whichever blog it relates to and I will log it on Facebook and Twitter – and if anyone reads it, all good, and if no-one reads it, all good.
In the end, I understand that I am doing this for me, no-one else, and that has to be a good thing. I’m over tilting at windmills…. at least until next time.
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