That writing mood

I started re-editing The Famous Cassini Brothers, post-critique, and I'd planned to blog about how that's been going. But, I hit an emotional wall this week. A huge one. This isn't the first time this has happened. When I started college nearly five years ago I got this horrible, unexpected mood/anxiety disorder. I'm a pretty emotional person, I wear my heart on my sleeve, but crying in the middle of a lecture and skipping classes is not something I expected.

So, I left college, got a job, quit that job, and slowly, I managed to claw my way back to some form of emotional normality. I got over myself and got sick of feeling sorry for myself. Oddly enough, I'd never been more creative. I wrote more, entered contests, started freelance writing. All in the middle of feeling lost and confused. There were days when I felt really happy, almost hopeful. I couldn't write on those days. And I couldn't write on the days I spent crying either. But somewhere between deluded happiness and total despair I managed to write a lot.

Which brings me to the wall. Just when I had started to really get better I panicked. It's the sort of panic a 24th birthday brings on (yay quarter life crisis!). Combine my sudden sense of mortality with lazy agnosticism, and you get me contemplating the universe, my place it in, and just what the hell is going to happen when I die. I was having the kind of thoughts that made me wish I'd been brought up by a more religious mother. Every problem has solution, but nobody has figured out how to cheat death. So the crying started again. And no writing got done at all. I could edit just fine, but writing didn't get done. Except for this blog post which I can write because I feel better, and also because I don't have the pressure of having to write anything a certain way. I can write anything I want on a blog. It doesn't work that way when I write for money or if I'm writing within the confines of a plot or time period.

I don't know what the solution to my emotional wall is. Based on experience it might be something as simple as my bad sleeping habits or diet change. But, this has helped me realize that when I feel absolutely horrible, editing is the best form of writing to do, because it's hard to get actual writing done.

What mood do you have to be in to be able to write or edit? Have there been times when you couldn't write at all?

Photos courtesy SXC.