If you have any tricks of your own on how to vanquish the fear of beginning, please share them in the comments.Īt least, I hope you'll look at it that way. I can tell you from experience, it will not be easy.Īnd this is where I need your help. Trick and TreatĪnd so whenever I start a writing project (like this one), the ghost of a memory rears its foreboding head.Īnd becomes like the ghoulish house you want to avoid when you're trick or treating because you know if you ring the bell, it might come to no good.īut starting today, I'm going to try to approach that irrational fear of blankness from another angle.Īnd that will be my trick: to magically transform a menacing screen from a punishment into a bright ray of imagination. Now, I'm not blaming my teacher, but let's just say the empty page evokes an undercurrent of terror I still feel today. But the whole event was shocking for a young, impressionable mind. The other students and I all breathed a palpable sigh of relief. 'It doesn't matter what happened between us before, I'm wiping the slate clean.' In addition to her pedagogical duties, she was known as the hall monitor of doom. My teacher, an imposing woman with bright auburn hair and a big voice came into the room, glared at us without saying hello and bellowed: 'It's no secret I've had negative encounters with many of you before.'īig pause. I first encountered the bone-chilling idea of a tabula rasa in the fifth grade. Unable to move my fingers across the keyboard yet at the same time glued to my seat. Something to get me started.īut instead, I'm immobile. To me, those words conjure up the image of a Zombie (me) staring glassy-eyed at the bright, white light in front of me. Whenever I approach a blank screen, I'm reminded of the latin phrase, tablula rasa-an empty or pristine slate.

(And yes, I'm sure I came up with this week's headline because because Halloween is around the corner.) A Zombie Called Tabula Rasa So here I am, trembling almost, yet determined to vanquish the demon. It taunts me till I just can't procrastinate anymore. This bone-chilling fear of an empty screen is something I face up to every time I write one of these newsletters-or try to be creative. įolding laundry, having a junky snack, reading, going for a walk because I'm nowhere near my 10,000 steps, riding my bike to a park to gaze at the colorful leaves, watching old sitcoms on TV, getting lost in social media, making excuses. And to be honest, just thinking about it gives me the chills.

Observer game white screen