It’s terribly disenchanting to have to admit this, but I can’t write. It’s not a physical incapability. I mean, I have fingers to hold a pencil or peck away at a keyboard. I have a brain that thinks up lots of things I’d like to write about. In fact, that’s how I spend most of my daydreaming time — imagining all the topics I’d like to write about, all the subjects on which I’d be terribly qualified to educate the masses, all the twisted plots I’d like to see played out by Johnny Depp on the big screen. But for some reason, when I sit down to write, facing the blank screen or the empty page, unless I have a deadline and someone depending on me to write, all those wonderful thoughts and ideas start running in circles and leaping out of my ears onto the cold, hard pavement below. And I’m left with a mind that’s as blank as the screen.

I keep taking career and aptitude and interest and personality tests, but I don’t know why. They all tell me I should be a writer. Well, a writer or a member of the clergy, but I assume that’s just the universe’s way of teasing me. Maybe my subconscious is guiding my results on all these tests and skewing them toward writer, but even if that’s the case, perhaps especially if that’s the case, then writing is what I’m meant to do, right?

I just love the whole idea of it: jotting down observations of the world around me, working with words and phrases to make them fit the ideas in my mind, imagining people and places, and fiddling around with the English language until it’s just so. The range of things I could write about seems limitless. I want to write about dogs and feminism and Shakespeare and gopher shooting and business travel and self-help theories and shoe shopping and divorce and teenage angst and middle-age angst and reality television and Crystal Light. I feel like I need to write about everything all at once, like there’s some urgent need to get everything about myself and the world around me down on paper right now.

Then there’s the fear. If I never write anything, I can go on pretending that I’d be a really awesome writer if only I had the time or inclination to do it. If I actually give it a shot, I’ll be exposed as the pathetic fraud that I really am. And once I’ve agonized over a keyboard for long enough to eke out a few sad little paragraphs, I’ll have to face the bitter reality of editing, revising, and proofreading. Once I’ve gotten all those words out of my head and onto paper (real or digital), I don’t want to have to see it again, try again to tame those words that only get more restless when disturbed.

My mom thinks I’m afraid of success, not failure. I think maybe I’m afraid of both, but becoming a success certainly seems like less of a hardship than failing miserably and spending the rest of my life in a job that requires a name tag.

One problem is that I am a planner. I like to gather information from every conceivable source, assemble it physically and mentally in some kind of logical way, and check all sources again to make sure I haven’t missed any crucial or trivial tidbits, before I can begin any project. This is especially true with writing.

Case in point: I just spent about two hours searching the internet for blog tips, blog information, blog marketing techniques, blog profitability enhancers, blog posting ideas, and blogs about blogging. The word “blog” is starting to look funny. Right now, while pecking out a few words here and there, I’m searching the library system and Amazon for books on creating weblogs. It’s a sickness. I have to feel completely educated and prepared for a task before I can attempt it.

The sad part is that, once I’ve thoroughly researched every aspect of a topic, I lose interest and never actually do what it is that I spent all this time preparing to do. Writing is a little different, because I never lose the urge to write. Instead, I just run out of time or energy, but that nagging voice that tells me I should write remains. This leaves me in a constant state of nagging agitation and unfulfillment. Which brings me to where I am right now. Writing this treatise on why I can’t write in an ironic attempt to actually get writing, to get some oomph to crawl over that first speed bump.

I’m hoping that this blog format will be the magical cure to all my writing woes. I know it won’t really do all that, but it’s fun to think about. I need a place to put stuff I’ve written, a place that will be waiting for me to keep putting stuff there, a place that’s not too picky about how eloquent or life-altering the stuff is, but a place that will actually be viewed by at least one or two other people, maybe for feedback, maybe for dialogue, maybe just for confession or venting or navel-gazing. I hope this blog will do that for me, motivate me, give me a reason to keep on writing.