Writer’s Block: A Sign Of An Existential Crisis?

As someone who decided to pursue a career of words and ideas, I always imagined that the job would be filled with endless nights of writing as ideas would keep popping up in my head every hour or every other day. However, I woke up one day and realized that I wasn’t doing any of those things.

Writer’s block has always been the never ending cause of struggle and frustration for every writer. The feeling of being stuck and the inability to move forward, because of a sudden and unexplainable mental block is extremely frustrating and the desire to find a sudden burst of inspiration almost becomes a hunt for the Holy Grail. It wasn’t until later on that I realized this sounded like a lot like an existential crisis.

The claim and correlation between writer’s block and an existential crisis does seem a little outlandish to someone whose doesn’t write for a living, but for writers, this can arguably be a legitimate claim. For writer’s, writing is their life, their career, and arguably their identity. If some unexplainable mental block prevents them from living their life, then everything would come into question.

Of course, this is largely dependent on the severity of writer’s block. If the state of a writer’s life and identity is largely tied and represented in their work. Then someone who doesn’t write as much or as consistently is quote on quote “Fucked with an identity crisis.” However, what would be the best step to avoid such a scenario?

Many websites claim that the best way to solve writer’s block is by finding creative help and connecting with people. Through this, you are able to experience new things and suddenly come up with inspiration to write. However, from personal experience I can say that attempting to find inspiration through experiences can serve as distraction from the bigger picture to solving writer’s block and an identity crisis.

If solving an identity crisis would mean solving your writer’s block, then what would it take to fix this? Everyone has their way of getting past writer’s block, but to get past both an identity crisis that is linked to writer’s block requires a larger focus and reflection, or in cruder and simpler terms “Get your shit together.”