In the Wee Small Hours

Used to be the thing that kept me up at night was money. Or rather, that I had none and that people still wanted it from me. There's a special kind of panic attack/heartburn that only those in serious debt can truly understand, and so I think the fact that I will be free of personal (not educational) debt in less than four months is an understandably joyous one, because it means that my esophagus will be leading a kinder, gentler life.

Now, however, I am discovering a new brand of insomnia, one associated with the fear of writer's block. This is not to say that I have writer's block, because I don't. Can't say that all of the things I've been writing have been great, but they may have a seed or sheen of greatness waiting to be revised into fruition.

No, I'm worried about getting writer's block. As in, my thesis is due in less than 8 months. A rough draft is due in about 4. The fear is: what if all revisions lead to crap? What if, in the midst of crap, I can't come up with nuggets of purest gold to bring me out of the crap? What if, in my moment of greatest need, when what I need is the golden nugget of POETRY, what I get is the moose nugget of poetry, so devoid of poetical promise that the only thing to do with it is turn it into tie tacks and swizel sticks?

It's a terror of dross, is what it is, and it is why I've been reading my book (The Last Templar by Raymund Khoury, who I might add writes women very well, to the point that I though it was a female author) and have been stuck on the same page going, this is so much better than what I could write, what am I even doing here? And it's prose, for crying out loud. Not even the same genre and I'm still having comparative performance anxiety.

The other part of it is, what if the only good poems that I can spin are sonnet length? What if I can never break the page in a successful poem? I mean, I think I can, and Wilkinson liked El Resumen del Romanticismo, despite its work-in-progress-ness. But still, that's eating at my upper stomach. Yeah, gross, I know--try living it. I assure you, that's worse.

I think the real niggling doubt is that the thesis won't be ready, not because I can't write it, but because it's not what I'm supposed to be doing and so I'll set up roadblocks for myself. What if, after two years, I'm no closer to having refined my work than I was when I started? What if I keep taking courses, keep taking classes, only to find that none of the fruits of those labors satisfy me? What if I'm only hiding from something that I'm really supposed to be doing because I'm scared of what it might be? At this point, I guess the good thing is that I'm acknowledging the possibility of this, and so will be able to combat the symptoms of restlessness and procrastination, so I'll still get the degree, if not the satisfaction. Still...

Augustine may have said that the heart is restless, but if he were any kind of writer, he would have known that the restless of the heart can be controlled by moderate reductions in caffeine consumption. What he would have written is "Heartburn: Restless is the Stomach."