Feeling Uninspired? How To Get Out Of That Rut

By Therese Borchard

I stare at a blank page and can think of nothing to say. My anxiety grows. With every minute that passes devoid of inspiration, I panic. My breath speeds up and I can feel my amygdala, the fear center within my brain, getting ready to send out invites to a party. I am overwhelmed and frustrated. I feel defeated, pathetic, deflated. The longer I stare at the screen, the more convinced I am that I’ll never be able to craft another sentence in my life. I wait for something to happen, but am too disabled to let it happen. My breath shortens still more. My heart beats faster. Tears well up in my eyes.

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It’s an acute case of writer’s block, but it’s also an accurate description of how each of us feel in the throws of a depressive episode or anxiety spell. You want to move forward. You would do anything to be productive. But you are stuck in this invisible closet where you are constrained, constricted in all movements until you somehow emerge from the hell.

How do you proceed?

I asked this to a writer friend of mine recently.

“I start in the middle,” she said to me. “The first sentence is too overwhelming. I can’t commit to that. So I start in the middle.”

It makes sense. There is less pressure in the middle. The beginning and the end are too weighted.

I’ve been using this wisdom not only when I am stuck as a writer, but also when I’m paralyzed by the laundry, when the dishes chase me, when my cluttered desk scowls at me, when I can’t concentrate at work, when socializing is less enjoyable than a dental cleaning. It applies to larger things, too: choosing a career, navigating a stagnant relationship, figuring how I’m supposed to parent.

I start in the middle.

It works because life is not linear. As much as I want to place it between bookends, it’s messy and confusing, absurd and irrational. It lacks a beginning and an end, a straightforward path with an explanation. It’s full of questions with few answers, which is why the quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favorites: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.”

This article originally appeared on Everyday Health.