That’s why I can’t write right now.

I feel happiest when I am noticing my experience, and wondering about it. I need good stories, to survive. Life is surmountable if it feels understood. Here is the answer to this moment. I am not powerless. Everything is going to be okay.

I’ve written compulsively since I could speak. At age five, I insisted my teacher allow me to perform my poems and journal entries. The poems were probably about dogs being brown. I can’t remember the class’s response; it didn’t matter to me. I was impatient to assume my rightful role as knower-of-truth, and speak my wisdom into whichever blessed souls happened to be proximate—you’re welcome.

I was sure of the power and goodness of my voice, and abnormally fearless about using it. One day at recess, I gathered the class together in a circle around the tallest tree. A jealous classmate poached a few followers and formed a rival circle around the other tree, but I felt satisfied with my group. I declared us “The Nature Club.” I improvised an impassioned speech about how we were the stewards of the school yard, and it was our mission to do caring acts of service to sustain it. I picked up an acorn and implored them to see the potential of it. I pointed to the acorn, then the tree, emphasizing that the realization of this acorn’s potential rested on our choice to act right now. I made a show out of planting the acorn, explaining how moving it would feel to walk past this yard as adults and see the full-sized tree. I led us in a victory dance for the future tree we’d birthed together. “You’ve just changed the world,” I beamed. I delegated a group to fetch scissors to cut the grass, another to pull weeds, another to kick the ground-covering back into the flower beds, and a last to monitor the bees. They dutifully executed. Then I reported our acts of service to the teacher. She scolded me for taking scissors outside.

At age six, I spent all my time co-writing stories about imaginary worlds on RPG boards. Many involved societies of wolves (which I see as an evolution from the brown dog poems). I and my fellow writers were united in shared purpose and enthusiasm. I often wrote late into the night. I remember typing softly and soundlessly on the keyboard, so my parents wouldn’t wake up and yell at me. They disproved of computers and liked to give me chores when they saw me on it. They often told me I was rotting my brain.

At age seven, I took it upon myself to write a weekly newspaper detailing the goings-on of the classroom. There were serious exposés unpacking classroom policies, gossip columns, announcements, opinion pieces about social dynamics… The paper fell out of circulation after my parents yelled at me for using all the ink in the printer.

At age eight, I read a chapter book in one sitting for the first time—a sci-fi series about a group of teens who morphed into animals to fight the body-snatching brain-slugs taking over the human race. I remember the eight hours of singular focus producing a pleasurable altered state. There were fifty-four books in the series, and I completed one each day. My parents didn’t bother me when I read. Adults praised me for being “quiet, well-behaved, and pretty.” These always went together.

At age eleven, I grew to six feet tall. I walked elbow-and-knee-first, like a newborn colt. Men on the street began publicly evaluating my body. My brother grew disgusted with me. He made a point to tell me I was stupid whenever I spoke. I decided to keep myself a secret.

At age eighteen, men I knew drugged and raped my friends. I retreated from my body into my mind.

At age twenty-five, I committed to a career writing sociology. My writing exists in a continual state of non-completeness and inadequacy.

When I sit down to write now, I usually have something to say. Then, a few sentences in, I have thoughts about the thoughts I’ve just written. I delete the original sentences and replace them with my response to them. Then, thoughts arise about what I’ve erased, and what I’ve subsumed it in favor of, and why, and what that might mean for my actualization. What parts have I silenced? Which parts did the silencing? Who should be given voice? Then, I’m caught in an infinite loop of reflexivity that paralyzes me. What of me is true and real?

That’s why I can’t write right now.