Tangled Words: A Writer’s Resistance

A person's arm rests on a wooden desk next to an open, blank notebook and a black pen. Strings of warm, glowing fairy lights are tangled around the writer's hand and spread across the desk. Floating white text among the lights displays words like "fear," "write," "flow," "word," and "line," illustrating the mental struggle of untangling ideas.

I don’t get writer’s block. I get writer’s resistance—a persistent, internal pushback against the act of writing, even though the words are there. While writer’s block feels like a void where ideas should be, resistance is more like a tangled knot of ideas that I hesitate to untangle. Every word I need is swirling around in my head. Each word collides with and ricochets off the letters of other words, forming a chaotic dance that makes it hard to separate them into coherent thoughts. It seems like a chore to sort the words from the others, like untangling a bundle of string lights where every strand is knotted with another. I often find myself doing anything else besides writing—organizing my desk, scrolling through social media, or even tackling chores I’d typically avoid, like cleaning out the junk drawer. But once I finally write, the words find their way to the page, one after the other. I wonder if I’ll ever learn to trust the words, to believe that once I untangle the knots and separate the strands, they’ll flow freely and weave themselves into something meaningful.

A person's arm rests on a wooden desk next to an open, blank notebook and a black pen. Strings of warm, glowing fairy lights are tangled around the writer's hand and spread across the desk. Floating white text among the lights displays words like "fear," "write," "flow," "word," and "line," illustrating the mental struggle of untangling ideas.