I’m at this point where I sit frozen in front of an article I needed to have done months ago or a pitch for something that matters and I simply cannot write. It’s not so much writer’s block as writer’s fear. The words are in me and they do want to come out, I know the value of my own work beyond what I get paid for it.

Increasingly, however, I’m hit with this fear of what comes next.

On two different points, that is. It’s not just a fear of further harassment from people actively investing in misreading me all the way to my grave, but a fear of not being able to do the words justice. Of writing an article or a feature I’ve wanted to write for years and just… sucking at it. Which is wild because I have well over a million words published that show I’m good at what I do.

And when I’m frozen, I’m not working. I’m not writing. I sit on my couch and I watch TV, I do my day job that doesn’t require any writing (but I’m stressed out there too), and I try to tell myself that I’ll be fine if I can just email my editor, send that pitch, pull up dictation software and use it. But instead, I just sit there. . I’m behind on so many things I genuinely would’ve loved to have been finished with a month or two ago.

I was talking to someone earlier today about it and I realized that… I’m never going to get back to earlier output levels of writing. I won’t be writing the volume I did before my dad died, before he got sick, before the pandemic, before every single person in supposedly progressive queer/feminist fandom seemed to feel like it was okay to harass me viciously for years over my work. I hate that my normal keeps shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

I’m writing this out so that I can just… get it out. So I can say what’s been bothering me and how I feel so that I can figure out how to move past it. I’m so tired of avoiding my inboxes because I’m overwhelmed. This has to change. I’m just… struggling to figure out how.