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.

Embracing a New Approach: Choosing a Word of the Year for Personal Growth

A week and a day into the new year.
How are you doing with your resolution(s)?

I used to have a hard time keeping my ‘New Year, New Me’ promises—until five years ago when I gave up resolutions and replaced them with a word of the year—a simple theme to guide my year.

For example:
Curate.
1 select, organize, and look after items in a collection or exhibit.
2 select, organize, and present online content, information, etc., typically using professional or expert knowledge. Verb.
(google.com Oxford Languages)

This became my word of the year last year. I started with my home’s collection of stuff. My thought was, “If my house is the museum of my life, what do I want it to say about how I spent my life?” That made it easier to get rid of things that I didn’t like and things that didn’t speak to who I am. (This will be an ongoing project as my interests and life events change.)

This year, I’m focusing on part 2: actual writing, not reading, talking, wishing, or guilting about it. I want to write actual countable words and grow a collection of work.

What is your word of the year?