The hesitancy of sitting down to write is one which wins most often between the choice of the busying of my hands with other more-pressing, more-important, more-satiating tasks, and writing. Writing is always time-consuming and sometimes energy-draining; it is a creation and thus, leaves the creator vulnerable to critique if it is shared with others.

If it is forced, writer and reader see through it immediately. If it is organic, it speaks for itself.

While I used to write somewhat prolifically, I now am much more accustomed to distracting myself with other tasks. Surviving life and trying to find an authentic, faithful, accountable way of maneuvering my whole self in the world takes a great deal of my energy. Couple that with my care-taking posture and I sometimes have little self to create.

Further, there are so many manifestations of unjust systems that are built to intentionally keep folks (both human and nonhuman) at the bottom; these manifestations spring up every day and become accessible to us via social media platforms if they do not happen to be local. There is always something to write about, or to let that space of creation be devoted to listening.

There will always be a truth and untruth in the creation that writing brings (teachings from the principles of nonviolence). If I cannot hold both of those realities, then I cannot give my whole self to anything, but especially the creation that writing produces.

In light of these elucidations of why I frequently claim writers block as a malicious disease with which I have been plagued, the irony remains that I am actually writing this piece and that my agency remains to take up the pen. Because it is in the writing, the creation rather than consumption, that I re-acquaint myself with the discipline of being faithful to who I am. I am a writer who, at her very core, believes that consumption, as a way of being, is the very worst posture one can take through life. A writer who will live alive and die believing love is the only way to be fully alive.

I will never apologize for loving. I will never apologize for being me.

That’s why I write today.