Running out of Words

A few weeks ago I finally got around to helping my parents clean out boxes of my old stuff from the basement. Besides finding countless embarrassing photos, I found basically everything I've ever written. Journals scrawled in my third grade handwriting, triangle folded notes, poems with big bubble letters. And I was torn - what do I throw away? What do I keep? And suddenly I had this irrational fear that if I threw anything 0ut, it would somehow go against my total word count for life. Irrational, remember? As if each writer is allotted a specific number of words and if I did not keep the ones I'd written before, I might run out. But it was in this realization of the absurdity of this that I discovered there is no end to the words I can write. There's no end to the poems, the stories, the lines. That for as many words that exist there are infinite combinations yet to be created. That even if I threw away every bad (or even remotely good) thing I found in that basement, there could be no end to what I can write.

I think sometimes my writer's block is a result of this subconscious belief - like the best is behind me. Or I've already written it. How absurd! The best can be the next thing I write - of course, so can the worst. But the real take-away, is that there is no limit to what I can write, as long as I choose to do so.