What do you do when you find yourself at the sharp end of a sword?

When the cold blade is pressed against your throat, what thoughts instantly flicker through your mind? Maybe you wonder if this is the end. Or perhaps a little theatrically, you imagine your life flashing before your eyes in a cinematic montage, just like the films promised.

These are the strange bunch of thoughts inhabiting my mind lately. It wasn’t because I accidentally time-travelled to medieval Europe and got myself caught up in a duel to settle a point of honour, but because I cannot write for over a month now. For someone whose work depends on words, this feels almost existential.

I try to look for an answer, even toy with a theory that writing ability might be like a natural resource: you use it up, and then it’s gone. Maybe some people have an unlimited ‘natural resource’ of writing ability and some people have a limited one. And in my case it’s probably the latter,  I’ve used it all up, and that’s why I can’t write. This would be the alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis, which I would prefer to be true, is that there is no relationship between writing ability and the amount one writes.

I finally bring it up with my supervisor after missing several major deadlines in a month and earning a fairly respectable amount of disappointment along the way. He recommends that I write about why I can’t write. And so begins the fact-finding mission of trying to understand why my brain refuses to produce anything useful. I’ve been writing other things, of course, but they aren’t really my own pieces, mundane things written out of necessity, not something I could truly own.

I’ve always hated writing, especially on paper. I occasionally wrote diaries, but it was never consistent; it felt almost chaotic whenever I thought about writing something down. Probably because my words never caught up with what I was actually feeling, and I liked the thoughts better in the dreamy, hazy place of my mind than actually seeing them on paper, where it felt like total rubbish or rather very much different from what I was actually thinking. 

Ironic as it sounds, I ended up starting my career in a writing job. American poet and literary critic, Dana Gioia, once said, “I think that really good writing comes both from the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. A good writer can make the two of them sort of dance a duet.” I think I never learned to orchestrate this duet; writing was something that just seemed to be there, I was able to write when I needed or wanted. 

I’ve never been entirely sure why I disliked writing (especially by hand). Maybe it had something to do with time, and with perfection. When we’re typing, there is always backspace to rescue in case we don’t like something. On paper, it looks messier, it shows our shabbier thoughts, and everything takes longer. And my aversion probably came from needing things to be perfect before I could move on to the next word, the next line, the next prose. It felt almost excruciating not to find the right next word among all the possible permutations and combinations. I learned to get over that eventually, of course, because I had deadlines. 

It’s not as if my writing was exceptional before this. I often hid behind literature, borrowing ideas from books I like to ease myself into a topic. That was my writing style for a while. It worked, until it didn’t and I can’t bring myself to contrive any grand allegorical strategy or comforting metaphor to introduce my ideas.

Writing, at its core, demands a degree of honesty after all, an exposure of thought that feels uncomfortably close to removing that carefully maintained mask we have built for ourselves. When the usual tools fail and familiar devices fall short, it leaves something raw that we might not be comfortable to face. 

After I shared my idea with one of my friends about writing ability being a kind of natural resource, he laughed it off, “That’s not how writing ability works. That’s not how ANY ability works,” according to him. But if you think about it, sometimes our memory and brain function in strange ways that neuroscience has not yet been able to properly map.

For instance, why do we dream? This is a simple, straightforward question that people have been asking for thousands of years, and many have tried to answer it over time. But have we been able to pinpoint a definitive list of reasons for why we dream? There are only a handful of workable theories, from dreams being a kind of random “screensaver” the brain plays (the activation-synthesis theory), to the idea that they help us fulfil desires or problem-solve. The most cited example used to support the idea that dreams help us solve problems is probably August Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene structure, where he claimed to have discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule from a daydream of a snake biting its own tail. But these reasons are not universal, there are probably many more explanations that we still don’t know.

Another thing about the brain that has always baffled me is how we see colours. We learn to name colours because we are taught in childhood that this is blue and that is red. But how do I know whether the blue I am seeing is the same blue as the one seen by the person right in front of me? He could be seeing orange and simply calling it ‘blue’ because that is what he was taught to call it. In that case, ‘blue’ is only the name he assigns to it and doesn’t necessarily mean he is experiencing the same colour as I am. 

Throughout the episode, the writer displays a manic, obsessive approach to his craft, driven by a cold, intellectualised fear of losing the emotional raw material of his grief. He explains that he cannot afford to mourn his aunt in the usual way, by breaking down or crying, because doing so would “use up” the emotion, leaving him with nothing authentic to write about later.

This reminds me of another recent incident with one of my colleagues, who introduced me to the term ‘astigmatism’. Apparently, it results from an imperfection in the curvature of the eye, and usually causes someone to see thousands of rays or lines coming out of a light source, especially when it is too bright.

For me, this was normal. I thought any person (nearsighted, shortsighted, or with perfectly normal vision) saw light exactly this way when it is too bright, because that is how I have seen light for as long as I can remember. I also assumed that my vision, corrected with fairly strong spectacles, would allow me to see things as a normal-visioned person does.

However, after the conversation with my colleague, I found out that this is not how light normally appears, even to those with imperfect vision. It is rather related to the cornea or the lens inside the eye, when they have mismatched curvature. Instead of having a smooth, uniform curve like a round ball, the surface becomes more egg-shaped, which leads to distorted vision, such as seeing car headlights as thousands of light “swords” radiating outward. A quick Google search told me that people may be born with astigmatism or develop it later. Perhaps I was born with it, and that is simply how I have always seen light, which is why I never questioned it before.

As humans, we use words and language so nonchalantly most of the time, without questioning it as well. Humans are interesting in the sense that they use language both to express and to hide things. Words can be deceiving, and in the case of people like me, who don’t (or can’t) read body language well, spoken words can be even more misleading.

When we meet someone new, we usually form a perception of them after talking for a while. Our mind builds an image of who they are and what they might have been through. If we know them well enough, or for years, we might even think we can predict how they will think or react in a given situation. My intention is not to suggest that this is wrong, sometimes it is accurate. However, in other cases, this is terribly misleading.

Let me return once again to Dana Gioia and cite one of his poems, where he writes:

“Most of what happens happens beyond words.
The lexicon of lip and fingertip
defies translation into common speech.”

What if the person we are forming assumptions about has deliberately constructed an image of themselves so that we perceive them in that certain way? This brings to mind that well-known Kafka quote: “I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.” As we grow up, we learn not to show our real face to everyone. Depending on one’s intention, agenda, and degree of morality, this can range from innocent coping mechanisms to small white lies to major secrets or crimes that one might be willing to protect at any cost. 

This idea of constructed identity extends naturally to writing as well. Writing, then, can also be deceptive in the sense that you never truly know what the writer’s original intention was. This may be alright, even wanted, in fiction, where a story is supposed to lead to directions that surprise both the writer and the reader. But what happens when it is not fiction, when the writer is trying to tell you something about themselves, as in personal essays or autobiographies?

Take Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for instance, which is widely regarded as autobiographical. The book follows Wright’s childhood with a degree of detail that suggests it functions as an autobiography. However, its apparent blending of fact and fiction has often been criticised, particularly due to specific dialogue and narrative that suggest a level of invention. Additionally, Wright omits (even distorts) certain details of his family background that would typically be expected in a conventional autobiography.

In the German series Der Tatortreiniger (the crime-scene cleaner), there is an episode where the protagonist Heiko Schotte goes to a writer’s home named Benning after Benning’s aunt dies in a supposed explosion. Throughout the episode, the writer displays a manic, obsessive approach to his craft, driven by a cold, intellectualised fear of losing the emotional raw material of his grief. He explains that he cannot afford to mourn his aunt in the usual way, by breaking down or crying, because doing so would “use up” the emotion, leaving him with nothing authentic to write about later.

This fixation makes him behave erratically, as he searches for the perfect, profound phrasing for even the simplest actions, such as someone climbing stairs, which he feels must carry symbolic weight for the reader. His own grief becomes a commodity for writing rather than something to be felt. Near the end of the episode, when Heiko shows him his Wurstbrot (sausage sandwich) brought for lunch, Benning immediately seizes upon it as a narrative device. Although the memory of his aunt preparing a Wurstbrot in a wood-panelled kitchen is not a real personal recollection, he integrates it into his writing because he sees it as a perfect literary bridge, using it to bypass his inability to access genuine emotion by constructing a calculated, evocative scene to introduce his aunt’s memory.

Maybe the real problem is not that some ability disappears like a depleted natural resource, rather the fact that we become so accustomed to functioning that we become unable to access our feelings. To survive daily life, we learn to flatten our emotions into manageable shapes and compartmentalise grief, fear, exhaustion, disappointment, even wonder, so that we can continue meeting deadlines, showing up to work, and performing the version of ourselves the world expects. Writers are hardly exempt from this and maybe even more guilty of it. Instead of sitting with emotions and allowing them to exist as they are, writers often dissect them, rearrange them, aestheticise them, converting them into material. The feeling itself becomes secondary to how well it can be written.

Maybe that is why the inability to write feels so unsettling. It strips away the mechanism that once translated inner chaos into something usable. Without that translation, emotions remain raw, undefined, and difficult to confront. And perhaps beneath all the theories about creativity, language, perception, and memory lies a simple fact that we spend so much time trying to function efficiently, as workers and professionals that we forget we are humans before anything else. Humans who are not always meant to intellectualise every feeling and package every experience into meaning, or transform every wound into something readable. Sometimes exhaustion is just exhaustion. And the inability to write is not something grand or romantic like “writer’s block,” but merely the mind refusing to remain productive all the time any longer.

Miftahul Jannat is a feature writer at The Daily Star. Sometimes she writes to make sense of the questions that refuse easy answers. Reach her at: [email protected] 

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