The Terror of a Blank Page

I wrote this last night while I was working on a take-home final.

It is 12:25 a.m. and I am staring at yet another blank page on my computer screen.

It's the curse of the English major. Over and over again you are confronted with blank pages. Over and over again you are asked to fill these blank pages with your knowledge, your opinions, your heart, your soul, your very self.

Sometimes I joke about how if you forget a pen in an exam you have to write the essay in blood. But this is said only half jokingly. Sometimes it feels like you are writing in blood. Blood and tears. As if the pen you hold is connected to your veins, connected to your tear ducts, and pours the things that keep you alive and make you human out onto the page.

After three and a half years of being asked to submit paper after paper - eight pages, ten pages, fifteen pages, twenty pages, MLA formatting, double-spaced, size twelve Times New Roman font, one with a title page, one without - it starts to wear on a person. There is only so much blood you can give up before you start to feel the consequences.

And then the blank page becomes terrifying. At one point I loved the promise of a blank page. I loved the process of shaping a paper, of orgainzing my thoughts. I loved crafting the perfect phrase, the brilliant sentence that conveyed my point perfectly. I enjoyed the thrill of finding a secondary source that backed me up. I felt satisfied when I finished a paper, knowing that my carefully chosen words conveyed my argument in a strong and clear way. But now I stare at a new word document or a sheet of looseleaf and feel nothing but panic. The language eludes me. Ideas float around in my head completely formless. They refuse to be confined in sentences. They refuse to connect to one another and create a coherent argument.

The joy is gone. Now I sit and tear out my hair, scream obsenities, throw things. I used to have a love affair with language. Now I fight with it. Out loud. Waving my hands. Looking like a crazy person.