Inactivity in life leads to more inactivity leading to further uselesssness and further hopelessness in life. By inactivity I don’t mean a day or two of languid leisure,whatI mean is an endless strech of unknown happenings. For a very long while now,  longer than weeks and months, longer than I’d like to admit, I have been waiting, for an iota of will, for some motivation, for some sign that writing, or to be precise words will come to me. But they haven’t. To be honest, it is not only writing that I have been missing, I have been wholly inactive in my life, not writing,not reading, not living. Some would say I am over romanticising my life, and I will admit I have a tendency to do that, it does come with an affinity to Victorian literature, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be false to say that I have been truly inactive in my endeavours. Life has happened lately, and with life I have happened,I have breathed, eaten, taken care of myself and slowly, gently, taken a few steps in the direction of shedding my winter leaves and opening up to spring. I wouldn’t call it fresh beginnings, beggining is something new, life isn’t new to me, neither is writing, and so I would call it a fresh perspective. But what exactly is my new perspective, one may ask? Truth be told I don’t know. All I know is inactivity in life leads to more and more inactivity, chaining you in an endless pit, making you feel useless and hopeless and more and more less.

So now that I have come to the conclusion that I haven’t read much, or written much, I must admit that I haven’t done much either. I haven’t lived well either. I have been lacking the love I give myself, that I  reserve for myself usually. And with that lack came a lack of everything, but as I have already mentioned, it is all a chain, a system that I have finally, finally broken.

I am a writer, but before that I am a reader. And you are truly in a fit when you aren’t even reading anything. I realised my fix was greather than I had imagined. The more I was away from words, the more I was okay with it, no pressure of proving, no troubles of doing. And that was scary, what do you do when you start succumbing to the fact that you are okay not writing and not reading. That’s when fear creeps in, fear of words leaving you too. What if the one constant left you too? To be honest I haven’t worried about this in a long time, but this fear hugged me not so long ago and I was restless and anxious to lose it all. To have built a longing and to lose it is something I still fear, although I am certain that one must be ready for all probabilities, but we will leave such bigger uncertainties for later. For now we deal with words. and as with the cases of things and people that we take for granted, words came back to me when I feared losing them. I don’t know if they came back because I was fearsome, or because it was time, but they did, slowly, gently, like a hot cup of tea  that slowly soothes you on a rainy evening.

At first I tested my waters with slow, soothing, happy audiobooks that wrapped me up yet further in a
cozy corner, and then gradually I took out my e-reader, tapping slowly, diving farther, and finally into heavy paperbacks that always take me back to classical eras. The sheer joy of having something known! But my difficulties did not end there, I was yet to put pen to paper, without which I still feel like I wasn’t doing enough. Enough! Enough! Enough! Enough for whom I would ask myself? An answer to which I never had, but since it wasn’t enough, I just opened up the computer and waited, no words in sight. I waited along while, I waited for days and months. And then one day I just got fed up with everything and I wrote a poem about not being able to write, and that was the end of my dry spell with words. It would be a lie to say that I started writing more almost instantly. But t I did eventually write more. Which brought me to yet anothe realisation.

More often than not,writers blame themselves for not being able to write. When in reality, they are working, they are writing even when they are not writing. Thingk about it, what words would flow from a writers pen, if they had no experiences, if they did not fight, cry, or become esctatic at the mere sight o a sunset, what would they write about if they hadn’t seen the kiss of that first love in the park? What would they write about if they wouldn’t be doing nothing. From nothing comes something after all. Kafka is living proof of it.

Franz Kafka
(from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923,)

20 January. The end of writing. When will it catch me up again? In what a bad state I am going to meet F.! The clumsy thinking that immediately appears when I give up my writing, my inability to prepare for the meeting; whereas last week I could hardly shake off all the ideas it aroused in me. May I enjoy the only conceivable profit I can have from it—better sleep.

Black Flags. How badly I even read. And with what malice and weakness I observe myself. Apparently I cannot force my way into the world, but lie quietly, receive, spread out within me what I have received, and then step calmly forth.

11 March. How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.

It would be vain to even mention myself and Kafka, or any of the further writers that I am going to mention further,in one sentences, but these writers give me power when I am powerless. It is difficult to keep it sometimes. Words and emotions day after day after day. And yet you feel not enough,not capable enough.


Anne Sexton
(from A Self Portrait in Letters)

November 14, 1960

Dear Nolan:

Hello. Are you okay? I’m still here, not doing much—not writing enough, not writing good strong stuff—just coasting along with all my needles threaded, too busy worrying to sew. Worrying? Well, it is a difficult period . . . one book out, most reviews in, and the feeling that I’m a fraud, that I didn’t write the thing but that I stole it somewhere. New poems come slow . . . the fun’s gone. Or maybe it’s just now, maybe soon, maybe sooner I’ll get it back. I have about 25 pages toward a second book but some of it isn’t too good . . . I am allowing myself weaknesses that I wouldn’t have permitted a while ago. Or maybe I’m wrong . . . maybe not weak. Hell-bell! I worry obsessivly (can’t spell that one) and can’t seem to feel that I’m lousy or great . . . but both. Have a feeling that they (magazine editors) take my poems without reading or judging them . . . they were my super ego. I have a large group coming out in the Spring (I think) Hudson (some that you have seen) and they are okay I guess . . . also have a group of 6 coming out sometime soon in Partisan and they are the ones that worry me. Well, just today I made up my mind that to-hell-with-it, and that I’m not going to worry if they stink. They are a bad dream that I’ll put away. Do you think that is okay? Okay, I mean, to put away bad poems like bad dreams even when you have allowed them to be printed, revealed etc. It is all I can do.

Weaknesses we call it, powerlessness we call it. We worry, we dream, we term ourselves bad. But is it really? Or have we become accustomed to see ourselves with the filter of other’s eyes, diminishing our worth. My journal entries question my worth and work more than anything and it is Woolf whom I follow in mentioning the days and time of the entry, it is Woolf whose words I devour when today I have embraced words back again.


Virginia Woolf
(from A Writer’s Diary)

Friday, April 8th. 10 minutes to 11 a.m. (1921)

And I ought to be writing Jacob’s Room; and I can’t, and instead I shall write down the reason why I can’t—this diary being a kindly blankfaced old confidante. Well, you see, I’m a failure as a writer. I’m out of fashion: old: shan’t do any better: have no headpiece: the spring is everywhere: my book out (prematurely) and nipped, a damp firework. Now the solid grain of fact is that Ralph sent my book out to The Times for review without date of publication in it. Thus a short notice is scrambled through to be in “on Monday at latest,” put in an obscure place, rather scrappy, complimentary enough, but quite unintelligent. I mean by that they don’t see that I’m after something interesting. So that makes me suspect that I’m not. And thus I can’t get on with Jacob. Oh and Lytton’s book is out and takes up three columns; praise I suppose. I do not trouble to sketch this in order; or how my temper sank and sank till for half an hour I was as depressed as I ever am. I mean I thought of never writing any more—save reviews . . . What depresses me is the thought that I have ceased to interest people—at the very moment when, by the help of the press, I thought I was becoming more myself. One does not want an established reputation, such as I think I was getting, as one of our leading female novelists. I have still, of course, to gather in all the private criticism, which is the real test. When I have weighed this I shall be able to say whether I am “interesting” or obsolete. Anyhow, I feel quite alert enough to stop, if I’m obsolete. I shan’t become a machine, unless a machine for grinding articles. As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view. I wonder, though, whether this feeling that I write for half a dozen instead of 1,500 will pervert this?—make me eccentric—no, I think not. But, as I said, one must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling. I think the only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests—if one is damaged, to be able instantly to let my energy flow into Russian, or Greek, or the press, or the garden, or people, or some activity disconnected with my own writing.

So my question is, is writing about not writing, not writing after all? Hasn’t the spell already broken, the veil lifted? Hasn’t Kafka and Woolf and Plaths helped me again, in coming home?

Sylvia Plath
(from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

Monday, July 7 (1958): I am evidently going through a stage in beginning writing similar to my two months of hysteria in beginning teaching last fall. A sickness, frenzy of resentment at everything, but myself at the bottom. I lie wakeful at night, wake exhausted with that sense of razor-shaved nerves. I must be my own doctor. I must cure this very destructive paralysis & ruinous brooding & daydreaming. If I want to write, this is hardly the way to behave—in horror of it, frozen by it. The ghost of the unborn novel is a Medusa-head. Witty or simply observant character notes come to me. But I have no idea how to begin. I shall, perhaps, just begin. I am somewhere in me sure I should write a good “book poem” a day—but that is nonsense—I go wild when I spend a day writing a bad twelve lines—as I did yesterday. My danger, partly, I think, is becoming too dependent on Ted . . . I enjoy it when Ted is off for a bit. I can build up my own inner life, my own thoughts, without his continuous “What are you thinking? What are you going to do now?” which makes me promptly & recalcitrantly stop thinking and doing. We are amazingly compatible. But I must be myself—make myself & not let myself be made by him . . . I won’t get my writing schedule from outside—it must come from within. I’ll leave off poems for a bit—finish the books I’m now in the middle of (at least five!) do German (that I can do) & write a kitchen article (for Atlantic’s Accent on Living?) a Harper’s Cambridge Student Life article—a story “The Return” & suddenly attack my novel from the middle. O for a plot.

So hysterical or not, isn’t it important to be myself first and then try. So what if I haven’t read or written for months now. Have I not become myself gradually. Whatwould be the point of doing it without the intention of doing it without my heart in it. Isn’t it better this way,. When my heart is in it, when I have embraced the fact, that believe it or not, however much I love words, there will be prolonged periods when my mind and heart won’t co-operate and I will have to give in,I will have to write recipes and love messages,but no poetry or prose. Writing has to come from within, even about not being able to write.