It’s not that you cannot think of anything to say, or that you have nothing to say, it is that you have so much to say your brain cannot decide where to begin. So it sits frozen, staring at a blank page, constipated with ideas and unable to bring those ideas and thoughts through in an organized fashion.

In other words, Mental Constipation.

The only cure I’ve found is to begin a free-association type game with myself. Get the flow going once again by unblocking the bottleneck in my mind. I begin jotting down random ideas and thoughts that come into my head and let them lead the way for their more cohesive sisters to finally break through.

Sometimes even that doesn’t work. Sometimes, like girls are prone to do, they all think they are the most important and fight to be seen first, effectively re-congesting the narrow passages between my mind and the paper.

This is where I stand today. Mind raging with ideas and thoughts and questions. Blog pages empty and void of any signs of the tumult inside me. It’s like watching the the tv show "Lost" with the sound off, fascinating in its visual chaos but ultimately incomprehensible to the viewer (not that the sound has helped much these days).

I have been studying for two exams; well, one in particular — on language and communication, particularly focusing on critical thinking/reading/writing and on writing essays. This exam is multiple choice. Another exam in late January will be all written essays and a fourth will be a research paper. Through all this studying I’ve discovered just how amateurish my own writing, and my thinking process during writing, is. Realizing how often I skipped the necessary steps of quality writing causes me to cringe, but its the constant conscious "need" to go through those steps now that has really locked me up mentally.

I find I want to write posts about a great many things, only to slam against mental constipation as I try to adopt better writing habits by incorporating the steps I’ve recently learned. Rather than releasing everything in a more orderly fashion, the steps seem to have brought all my ideas and thoughts to an abrupt halt, as if they’ve never seen a flight of stairs in their lives and are frightened to death of taking a hard tumble into the abyss below should they trip on their way down. No one seems to want to make her grand entrance as a post here, or anywhere – even my journals – for that matter, as they all are more accustomed to strutting their stuff down a runway rather than down a winding staircase. And no amount of free-form writing will coax them from their perches at the top of the stairs. Nor has it brought order to their desperate crowding. Each still pushes her way to the front and demands to be recognized as first and most important in the parade, even while steadfastly refusing to begin the parade.

This is what madness must look like from the inside.