blank pages.....

I hate staring at this blank box.

My mind, though full of thoughts only minutes before, becomes stark and barren. Tumbleweeds drift through and the theme from "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" echoes through the lonely landscape.

I feel the same way when I open a new notebook. I open it, the cover is still stiff, and I gaze upon the clean sheets of paper. My mind goes blank. I panic. I was just brimming with lists and goals and the subtle excitement of a clean, fresh notebook. But the blank page intimidates me. What do I really have to say? What is so important that I have to make a list for it and document it anyway? My handwriting is horrible and I hate to mark it up with my haphazard chicken scratch.

I like notebooks. The prospect of what they could be filled with fills me with hope, "this time I'll be organized. this time I'll fulfill my goals."

I buy them, bring them home, open them up, rejoice in that new notebook smell and.....theme song again, please.

I have found a way around this.

I don't write on the first page.

I go a couple of pages in. There the pages don't mock me with their vast open space, twittering quietly to itself "I knew she couldn't do it" like that first page seems to do. I see the lines ready to be filled, I'm thinking of lists again and I'm off to the races, as they say.

I wish I could do that here. You don't know how many times I sat in front of this screen pounding out a line or two only to backspace it all away. Thinking the whole time that these ideas for posts don't sound as good in black and white as they did in my head.

Then I give up and go stream something instead.

If I could just flip a few pages here I would be fine and you'd have more posts to read.

Considering this is the first post of the year, maybe I gotta think of like that first writing in a notebook; hard to start but once that first (or in my case, tenth or eleventh) page is written on it gets easier and easier to mar those once beautiful pages with my chicken scratch.


relax,
paulina