I find I’m incredibly susceptible to mental blocks. This is something I’ve only become aware of recently, but I think it’s a major cause of my procrastination and literary frustrations.

Sometimes I’ll get an idea in my head, and I just won’t be able to let go of it. It’s often just a vague image, a fleeting memory, a mildly humourous thought, but I have a hard time stepping over it. It will completely block my path until I do something with it, which can often take some time. Some ideas need to grow flesh and skin in my mind, else I risk the chance of uploading a bloody mess of a weblog entry. The problem is while I’m waiting for this idea to grow into something that could or could not be useful, I tend to not do much else. I wait for one idea to succeed or fail before moving on to another.

This isn’t a matter of not being able to multi-task. If I wasn’t able to do that, I would have been fired from my job long ago. I just occasionally get…stuck, I suppose. There’s really no other way to describe it. I think there’s probably two reasons this happens to me.

Firstly, I put too much weight in ideas. Once I get an idea that I think will work for a weblog entry or story, I’m absolutely determined to make it work. I’m afraid to let it slip away and be lost, as if I only have a finite number of ideas at my disposal. I would actually hold onto ideas that I thought were really good, in hopes of developing my skills enough to someday do them justice. I’ve recently discovered that ideas are virtually worthless when it comes to writing. There are millions of ideas out there, and it’s best to just use them up as they come along and make room for the better ideas. Because there will always be better ideas.

Secondly, I’m fairly sure I have a minor case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Very minor, but still there. I displayed symptoms while growing up, but for some reason it just never registered with me. I remember repeatedly having to check the lock on the door when I’d entered the bathroom as a kid. I’d lock the door, look into the mirror, go back and check that the lock had actually locked, look back into the mirror, go back and check the lock, and so on. I’d always do this at least three times, but when I was tired or stressed it would occasionally happen upwards of fifteen times. I had a few other physical symptoms, such as developing a couple of small twitches for a short time when I was a teenager, but I think most of the symptoms were mental. I would just focus on silly, irrelevant things for ridiculous amounts of time.

It wasn’t until I was in university that it suddenly donned on me that this was happening. I remember I was watching the episode of Scrubs where Michael Fox was guest starring as a doctor with OCD. There was a scene where he was washing his hands for hours and couldn’t bring himself to stop. I was thinking to myself that I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to get stuck in a loop like that. I then thought wait a second, I do know what that feels like. I don’t know why it took me so long to think twice about my weird behavior, but once I did it was a startling revelation. All of these examples from my life came flooding into my head. Shortly after that, I shared my amazing discovery with my friend Tanya, to which she responded “well, yeah. Of course you are.”

Interestingly, once I realized that I had a tendency to be obsessive and compulsive, I was really able to pull things together. It was a cause of a lot of social anxiety and stress in my life. When I obsessed about something, I would procrastinate everything else. For example, if I had an event in the evening to go to, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done during the day. My mind would keep focusing back to that event. Once I was aware of what I was doing, I was able to break whatever mental or physical loops I found myself in. I could tell myself to stop checking that lock and brush my teeth or to stop focusing on my final exam tomorrow and finish writing this essay. I was getting a lot more done, and my stress levels dropped dramatically.

Obviously someone with a real case of OCD doesn’t have the option of just stopping themselves. It’s not possible for them to control the disorder. Without medication, many wouldn’t be able to live regular lives. This is how I know I don’t have the disorder. I don’t know what the medical term would be for me. Most likely a spaz.

Anyway, what I have long-windedly been trying to get to is that I was obsessing about writing the same way I obsess about events in my life. I find a good idea, and I focus on it until I write it or until it dies. Once I realized I was doing that, I started to force myself to start another post or story and let the idea grow in the background. Sometimes it will turn into something I want to pursue and sometimes I drop it, but I’m always working on something else on the side.

I think other writers, even those not nearly as spastic as I am, let themselves fall into this trap. Maybe not with minor weblog posts, but when focusing on larger pieces of work, such as a manuscript they’re trying to publish. I’ve chatted with someone who had been trying to get their work published for six months without any bites. He was becoming frustrated and had started to doubt himself as a writer. During those six months of trying to get published, he hadn’t written a single word of new material. He was stuck in a mental loop when he should have been branching out and testing other ideas during that time.

I think maybe everyone is a little obsessive at times, to varying degrees. Just remember to take a step back and see if you’re sticking to the floor from time to time.