I can’t write but I will keep trying

Jan 17, 2026

Writing has always come easy to me, I wrote fan fiction in between classes when I was 14 and at some point my harry potter fan fiction finished the whole diary I was writing in. Words used to flow out of me with a confidence that it deserves to be seen. It wants to be read, felt and traverse through minds that aren’t my own.

But in the past few months I noticed how hard and daunting it was to write. Writing was my most confident skill. And I couldn’t dip into it anymore. The times when I felt awful, I wrote to feel better and vent. When all my skills failed - as a designer, as a creative person ; writing pulled me out of the dumps. But not anymore, I was terrified of writing and anybody seeing it, thinking that maybe - I wasn’t as imaginitive and colourful with my words as I thought I was, the articulation I relied on to feel intellectually superior than everyone else in the world, just felt out of reach.

What happened? How can I lose something so innate to me?

Turns out there was someone else that had started living in my head. There is a voice that starts growing in your mind when somebody is constantly butting heads with you. It happens slowly - when you express your opinions on things, express how you think your reality works and it’s met with criticism more often. The voice starts to dwindle, if everything is wrong - there must be something I’m doing wrong, I’m probably living wrongly, *what I feel is probably wrong and I don’t know enough*

-crack-

Every time you feel something “I probably don’t know everything, I should ask more questions, be more patient”

One day you hear yourself speak less to others - “I probably don’t have anything valuable to say”

And not very long while later “I probably don’t know what I feel” you start outsourcing your own voice with whatever others around you say.

It’s not a writing problem, it’s not a creative block, it’s you not hearing yourself at all because “you’re probably wrong anyway”. And when everything you say to yourself is met with dismissal (by you), the emotional response to a thought, a feeling or even a germ of an idea is met with discomfort and exhaustion. And your ideas never live to see the light. Let alone on paper, even within yourself.

I am still struggling to figure out how one gets out of this. But I write with friends, I write alone, I write garbage, I write when I have thoughts. And I never ever judge, not my own or others. Just digging down to the fundamentals of why writing exists - to convey ideas. If you can convey whatever it is you want to say, you have succeeded in writing. No matter the colour of phrasing, the vocabulary or sentence flow. It only matters that you write like the fan fiction writer that wrote so that they can bring into life something they cannot stop thinking about. No matter that it is painfully embarassing to put your name to (some of these ao3 harry-draco smut writers have the confidence I wish to possess one day). The creativity that lives within you deserves to be written down so you can live a little lighter (and there are definitely people out there who feel as you do and are begging to feel like what they feel is not this foreign awful thing but just *human* ) So, write until you feel like it and whenever you are ready bless the world with what you feel and be blessed when somebody somewhere inevitably feels less alone by your writing. The words that you mould have more power than your brain is capable of imagining.

(and evaluate your friendship/relationship/work-ship/whatever-ship with the person causing you to constantly rewrite your own feelings)

Love,
Santa