It’s a strange relationship, the one I have with writing

For twenty years writing has paid my bills. For twenty years I have written for a living; about drainage, about walls, about roofs.

The writing that has paid my bills has also won awards and has helped win huge contracts for my clients. But the same writing also creates conflict. Conflict so significant that I go to bed with it tossing around in my head and wake up with it lying dormant just for that luxurious split second, until it realises I’m awake then hurtles to the front of my skull, fully recharged and ready to spend the day taunting me again.

My brain has convinced me that I don’t enjoy writing, when in actual fact I really want to love it. I want to write all the time, to be consumed by a constant flow of wordage, to be that person hammering away on a keyboard into the early hours in her pyjamas with nothing but shadowy lamplight, two sleeping cats and a warm glass of wine for company. I want that to be me.

I want to be inspired every day by the acquaintances I make, the conversations I overhear, the acts of kindness and cruelty I witness and the feelings I feel. I want to spew it all out into blogs and stories and to embrace every last full stop and apostrophe (especially the apostrophes).

But the drainage, the walls and the roofs are laughing at me, poking me with a stick, teasing me with the promise of future mortgage payments.

It feels like a physical blockage, starting in my stomach and weaving through my insides with the same dull nervous ache that consumes you when you’re dreading an exam, or an operation, or telling your husband you want a divorce.

I want to scream at myself. Why can’t I separate the writing I do at work, from the writing I desperately want to do for pleasure?

My only consolation is the inkling of a feeling. I sense it sitting there, in the dark recesses of me, waiting for a trigger that will finally unleash it; that will blast through the cruel mental obstruction like

And I can’t wait. I’m going to write until my fingers bleed. People will read my words, like them, hate them, find comfort in them and be enraged by them. And I can’t wait.

I really don’t understand what my problem is. Why can’t I just do it?

Maybe I should start with a piece about the strange relationship I have with writing.