That tightness in your chest of words unspoken.
Maybe this not-rightness you can actually feel, a pressure under the ribs like the butterflies before you reach the top of the ferris wheel, is a kind of spiritual distress. Or maybe it's just the pressure of what wants to be seen or written or faced and it's trying to get your attention any way it can.
You wonder if it might be easier if you could find some way to be more brave. Telling whatever truth you know or discover about yourself isn't that hard. Or maybe it's truer to say it gets easier to not look away when the digging uncovers something ugly you had not seen.
What freezes you up is worrying about the ripples.
Say each word written is a pebble thrown in the river of time. It's your job to find the best pebbles you can and get them to meet the water in the right place, or as close as you can come.
You can't think about where the ripples will go, who they will hit or help or hurt.
You hope they will find whoever needs them, do more good than harm. But if you start to count them or worry about them or even think about them, you'll get stopped in your tracks, shut down before you can finish.
Some days, you manage to ignore everything but the letters and words and sentences on your page, to focus on how they link together (or don't), to lose yourself in that vast whiteness in which each keystroke is the moment that matters, that keeps you afloat, that helps you breathe.
Those are the best days.
Days when the wave of "what-ifs" seems stronger are the worst.
You know telling your story all the way – finishing the book you have been trying to complete for years – is not a straight line. It's more like the path of a penny swirling down one of those change vortex machines at the mall, a series of spins in ever-decreasing circles, rolling and rolling until it finds its point of rest.