You Know What, Fuck It!

He said my blog was down, that it bores him when he has to come here looking for beautiful new stories then he has to bear the disappointment of finding none. He emphasised that consistency is very important if I am to make my blog a success. He continued to say that when people come and they are disappointed, it works against me because disappointment is arguably a form of heartbreak – and people don’t like heartbreaks. They are pain, and people flee from pain. “You are not pushing yourself hard enough.”

I knew he was right. But I had been struggling with my writing. I told him I had a writers block. I said, “I have ran out of inspiration to write. When I do, I end up with drafts.” The way he looked at me I immediately wished that those words had not left my mouth. I wished that I had gone into promise mode and tell him things like “I am sorry, it will not happen again. I will write more.”

“Have a seat.” He said. And here I knew that it was about to go down. Usually when he says “Have a seat,” you should know that you have done something wrong. That there was a moment when you did not use your brains like you should and he now wants to bash you while motivating you and showing you how to basically use your head next time. You can loosely translate “Have a seat”  to “You lazy idiot. Can’t even use your head for its purpose. What’s your use?!”

So I take a sit. Then he looks at me keenly in the eye – as if waiting for me to confess who murdered Tupac Shakur. My heart sort of beats fast and I’d rather be falling in an abyss in space rather than be in this situation. “I don’t think you are having a writers block. I think you are convincing yourself that you are in one, and you are comfortable hiding in it. I think you need to get out of it and stop bullshitting all of us! If you want to write, you will write.”

Now me I’m there like “Gai! What is this now?! I am not fooling anyone! I am serious! What do I even have to gain from not writing?” At this point I am not looking at him. I have kept quiet and busy playing with my fingers. I noticed they were rather pink. Maybe because of the temperatures. They are a bit sweaty but my armpits are worse. Then I realised how difficult it would be to live without fingers! Can you imagine? You’d rather not have a hand than have it without fingers. There are certain things fingers do that are just …amazing. Things that I will not mention here because Ezekiel Mutua might pull down my blog.

This talk never went anywhere. I made sure it did not. I did not respond to anything my ears heard because I wasn’t having this conversation. There is what someone on the outside perceives you to be doing and then there is what you are really doing. So how hard I am pushing myself or not is relative to the eye.

When I began to teach myself how to write with the intention of being a writer, I knew it was going to be hard, but not this hard. I had never anticipated that I would get to a point where I put my hands on the laptop’s keyboard and struggle to type anything. A point when I have a hot story brewing in my head but when I put it in writing it reads like the worst compilation of words ever made by a man with a fully functional brain. It frustrates me that I seem to have lost it (the writing thing). It is made even worse by the many unsuccessful attempts to get myself out of this situation. Even to write this blog has taken me more than a week and I don’t even like it!

My focus now is re-inspiring myself and restructuring my thoughts so that I don’t write blogs as boring as this one. There is a way I want to be writing and to be known to write. I’d love to get to a point where a reader comes across my articles and they know that I wrote it, or I was part of it.