Lisa blogs here

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Holds the place of thoughts unmet
Before they’re known I do forget
Collapsing into vague regret
Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet

So, I wrote a poem for the first time in 25+ years.  Fittingly it’s about writer’s block.  For many years I have struggled with my writing, stuck in a deeply debilitating rut of perfectionism.  When I did my first undergad degree I did my honours project as a creative writing portfolio and received first class honours.  I had such a reputation for my quality of writing that several senior members of faculty got into an argument as to who would be my second reviewer.

TL:DR – being a good writer was a foundational part of my identity.

When I moved into corporate work 5 years after graduating into a precarious work environment, I got busy doing the things necessary to build a secure career and the creative parts of me were gradually stifled.  Transitioning into design was so enlivening because it allowed me again to engage my creative self in a way far less constrained that it had ever been in services marketing and innovation roles.  At the same time I was paralysed with a fear of writing something so far below what I felt was suitable to my talent.  It was as if one poorly constructed paragraph could collapse my entire sense of self.

In 2017, when I was completing my capstone research project for Master of Design Futures, I realised how much of my creative self had been slowly suffocated throughout my corporate career.  I called it my partitioned self.  One of the things I had wanted to do was to re-incorporate this into my work.  I had aspired to model the structure of Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” where she included poetry alongside her analytic work, speaking emotional truth alongside intellectual argument.  It did not happen.  My paralyzing perfection kicked in and I could not bring myself to spit out even a single line.  I had thought to pick up the challenge of cultivating a new writing practice, free of the pressures of a capstone project.  It did not happen.

As I commenced my PhD I continued to struggle with putting words to paper.  Very early on my supervisors and I agreed that written reflection for field notes was going to be deeply hampered by this, so we experimented with other formats such as vLogs (although that didn’t really gain traction) and then finally a “wonder wall” – where I would capture key thoughts in the moment and jot them down on post it notes, to be considered and made sense of later.  (The concept of a wonder wall is borrowed from a colleague I once worked with who wanted a physical place in the office where people could record things they wondered about a key project we were working on so that later the project team could understand and respond to critical questions for the project’s implementation).  The wonder wall finally seemed to be the format that has allowed me to capture key data points without my inner critic getting in the way.  It has not, however, helped me get past the perfectionism that causes me to seize up in a white terror every time I’m required to write something.  For my first research symposium and my Confirmation of Candidature milestone I was able to confidently pull together presentations on what I wished to communicate, but the corresponding written pieces nearly undid me.  In both cases I was frozen until hard up against submission deadlines, when finally my fight or flight instinct (that biases strongly toward fight) saw me fight through the writers block to pull together written proposals.

In 2020 I am finally addressing head on my perfectionist-driven writer’s block.  I do this not just because it is necessary for me to finish my PhD, but because it is long past time that I breathed life back into my creative writing and re-integrate it into my professional practice.  To get the ball rolling a silly little poem on writer’s block seemed as good as any place to start.