Writer's Block

Sometimes, I set myself a goal--to post every so many days, to write so many hours a week. Sometimes, there's so much to write about that I don't want to summarize, so I just don't write at all. And it's silly to worry about, of this I am aware, as I am only writing a bit of my personal life on the internet for all to see. There's no novel in the works nor a deadline looming in the distance. There's just my desire to transform thoughts to words and even complete sentences to peruse later when the act of recalling memories so often has created a stilted history and I'm looking for something with the accuracy of things experienced in the moment.

But sometimes I can't be in the moment, which is one of my biggest sources of writer's block. The other seems to be finding a voice in my head that's not my own, whether from reading too much of a particular author or just trying too hard to relate a story. Lately, I find Perrault in my head, telling my life in Once-Upon-a-Times or filling my memories with castles and cobbled streets.

Or maybe that just comes from living in a city of cobblestones and spires. Sometimes, my life feels broken up into chapters so different from each other that they might as well be entirely different stories. And sometimes, I think back to all the opportunities I didn't take, to all of the forks in the road, and I wonder my What Ifs. I wonder what would have happened if I applied to spend a summer in Iceland four years ago. What if I had stayed in Korea? What if I had gone back as planned? What if I had never left the US in the first place? What if I had moved to Alaska?

I'm slowly pushing the What-If-I-Hads out of my head, in favor of What-Ifs.