Writer's block

What do you do when you cannot muster the discipline to align your thoughts and put them down on paper for almost 6 months? A phenomenon which can be described as a writer's block. You probably go looking for all the old stuff that you have ever written on the websites like Orkut and facebook including testimonials or some not so short posts and try to preserve them, hoping against hope that it might inspire you to believe in yourself once again and provide the much needed kick-start and momentum.

I did it this morning. Went scurrying on the orkut website to copy and save all testimonials I had written to my friends almost three years ago and hastily made a word document out of it.

It was a great feeling. Some of these friends I have not spoken to in a long time. And if I do a geographical analysis, between then I can cover almost all the continents. It feels nice sometimes to revisit the past. And the past now (as against in the past) can be revisited readily by clicking on those old photographs on your hard drive or by opening those first few emails which you sent to your friends almost 10 years ago. Most of it is lying there safely on the web world. Testimonials again I thought was the greatest invention of orkut and could have proved to be their USP if they would have played it right. Nothing ever provided such an expressive avenue to articulate one's feelings for friends. It used to be a wonderful feeling to open your orkut page to find that message "so and so has writtten you a testimonial" and in most cases tears almost always welled up in my eyes reading that stuff. May be not all of that was absolutely true but then it felt great. Sometimes it conjured apology towards that friend who I might not have seen in the same light in my life as he did me in his. For that one little invention Orkut spread more love on this planet.

Facebook horribly fails at it. It lets you say so much about yourself (What's on your mind?) but has no place to talk about your friends. You can like dislike etc but that too is a  more reactive than proactive expression. Facebook on the other hand seems to inspire more envy than love. There has been research which shows that on an average people feel bad after reading updates on their friend's facebook pages. It has almost become a medium of vindication. People engage in events with the thought of putting it up on facebook. Never thought that orkut ever instilled such emotions.

Anyways, if you have not tried visiting your old emails and orkut site in a long time do it now. Read those messages that you sent long ago and they would reveal a genuine you to yourself. In many cases I realised that I am now not even capable of writing those kind of messages. May be I am not as pure now as I used to be. May be I can still salvage myself may be not but then memories will persist. And certainly this exercise helped me revisit my writing style and how my thought process works, what am I passionate about and what my weaknesses are. All good starting points for waking up the sleeping (hopefully not dead by now) writer in me. A big reason behind this block is what can be called "Resistance". A powerful force that feeds itself on our fears and then works against us. The longer I don't write the more difficult it becomes for me to start again. This "Resistance" somehow makes us acutely aware of all the distractions around us and helps us push in that direction taking us further away from our goals - which for a writer is to write. In my case when I dont write enough my comprehension power of what I read declines too. This only aggravates the matter because the more my comprehension goes down the faster the number of ideas to write about decline. What's the way out? Don't know. May be as I wrote earlier revisiting what we have written before. Putting the ego aside and starting afresh with a willingness to make mistakes again.
There could be more ideas. Hope some of them will strike me. For now I am happy that that's about 600 words written now. Hope this will last and the writer's block will not come back to haunt me again.

Big thanks to Orkut and Yahoo mail too.