The other day, a good friend asked me, when I was babbling on, yet again, about my challenges with writing, “Who are you are you doing this for?”

His implication was that I surely couldn’t be doing it for myself, given the amount of struggles I was having with it and the (sigh) ultimate nothing to show for it. I told him it was for myself, which it is, but I also want validation. I am too professionally oriented to write purely for self-discovery. I want someone to say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” or something. Or maybe have someone write to me and tell me my writing had touched them in some way, clarified some point of reality, made them laugh, made them cry – made them react.

You see, I’ve had a taste of that – some of my writings are published and I love love love being paid for the stuff that I can conjure up out of my head. There’s something wonderful about being paid for your creative mind’s twists and turns. Not that nursing didn’t give me that. Well, okay, it didn’t, until I got into public health nursing, a lot of which is pure marketing.

And I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I didn’t write. How would I see the world? How would I taste it, feel it, feel about it, if I didn’t have the chance to put it in words?

And, finally, I want my kids to be proud of me. It’s a turnaround from the old wanting to be good for mum. I really really don’t want my kids to think of me as boring or unmotivated or unimportant, even as MS takes away things from me. I want them to think of me as always trying, always working on bettering myself. Or something.

So then the question arises, why is it so difficult for me at the moment? Why can’t I grab my imaginary world and wrestle scenes out of it to my command?

I sense part of it is the absence of quiet, of solitude, of just breathing for a few days in a row. There’s too much noise in my life at present. But I also feel empty, and in need of refilling my creative well. It’s a challenge to do both.

Any ideas about how to get refilled and restarted again?

For me, I think I shall throw myself into non-fiction for a bit. It uses my creative but practical mind, which seems to be still operative. Maybe it will give my fiction editor a chance to go back to sleep again. Grrr.