Work Stoppage

o5 April 2009
Tomas Morato
Quezon City


Temporarily, I’ve stopped writing. The decision is piercing - I have been craving to weave words for the longest time. It’s like turning back to something that is already within your reach. Or depriving yourself of something you have been hungering after without a break. For a moment, it has caused to break the masochistic surface in me.

But the judgment is a necessity, the verdict final. I can’t go on writing without giving fair dealing to words and metaphors and allegories. It’s all about upholding justice to any prose I am carving; it is a matter of integrity.

While writing for others is just clacking away vowels and consonants from their keyboards, it is a painstaking and scrupulous piece of art to me. Most of the time, it takes me three hours before I put 30 at the end of every article I write, for I would not stop from poring over word over word until they have complied with my taste. It is a vicious cycle of butchering my brain until it has hemorrhaged, tiring my eyes of rummaging around apt words, and going back to base one to check if the article has a sense at all.

Writing is my last resort – to bring me back to reality, to keep me sane. When I’m down in the dumps, I make sure to put everything into paper, without missing a detail, for I believe it is capturing history. It is my own version of photography. It is the thing I am looking after when I am lost (particularly in work), when I am submerged to haggardness, when I am haunted by the spectre of weariness.

I have written numerous articles, but I have settled on bringing them to a standstill as they are not sufficient to raise even a single strand of my hair. They are not up to snuff to exceed my first criteria – the sense of impartiality to all concern. They could be a disgrace to the writing community.

These are the reasons why I hibernate from my pen and paper. These are the very same reasons why PWB – Pseudo-Writer Block – keeps on floating up in my brain. I have no idea when I would start to write again. But since I am in a limbo of being sad and not in my work, I have no choice but to go back to jotting down a piece of crap.