Racism and Writer’s Block Unloced…

Last month on my way home from work I exited off the highway, and I cut behind a truck. I live in Texas so cutting across lanes is an everyday occurrence so I thought nothing of it. The truck then proceeded to honk his horn loudly at me and then pulled up next to me at the stop light. The driver rolled down his window and started yelling at me. I looked over and rolled down my window just a little. I realized how angry he was, and that he was cursing at me. I rolled my window back up and ignored him. He was still next to my car yelling. He then leaned out the window and spit on my car. He yelled out a racial slur that I refuse to type and told me to “go hang from f***ing a tree.”
I grew up in the south so I know that there are racist people. I have heard stories my whole life about the dark past that America holds with race relations. But I was still stunned, hurt, and confused. How did I cutting behind him in traffic warrant such a heinous response? So in my normal Erin fashion, I cried and then I called my daddy. I cried because I had never had something like that happen to me, and I called my dad because he always told me to tell him if someone ever messed with me.
It all just made me angry, fearful and most of all sad. With all those emotions running through me I pulled out my notebook and tried to write about it. But nothing came out. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t put into words all the things that had happened or all the feelings I was feeling. Then I started to doubt myself and my writing ability. “Maybe I am not as good a writer as I thought?” “What if I have nothing else to say?” “What if the people who told me I was good were just lying to make me feel good?”
All these different thoughts were running through my mind. I have this bad habit of spiraling out in my thinking. I get a thought and then it spawns all these other thoughts and I overthink myself into a frenzy. All that spiraling led me to not being able to write anything because I was thinking about so many things. I had a serious case of writer’s block. I tried to try different methods to get rid of it. I took a walk. I read a book. I even googled “How to get rid of writer’s block?” Nothing seemed to work. I reached out to an amazing poet that I met once and asked him what he does if writer’s block ever pops up and he told me something that I thought was profound. He said that writer’s block doesn’t exist. It is simply a mindset. I don’t ever run out of thoughts or feelings so I should just get out a blank piece of paper and write as much as I can. So that’s what I did. I wrote about how that incident made me feel. I wrote about all the different scenarios and how the situation could have played out. I even wrote about how I couldn’t write.
I did what my counselor calls got my power back. I refused to let that terrible incident stop me from doing what God put inside me to do. When you start to walk in your purpose and do the things that you were meant to do there are going to be obstacles that will present themselves. There will be people and things that will try to stop you from being who you were meant to be. But you have to make the decision to keep going. Change your mindset and you can change your whole life. The place you are in is just a state of mind. My mom has always told me that “One monkey don’t stop no show.” What that means is that whatever happens, whoever tries to block your shine shouldn’t stop you from carrying on. You are who you choose to be. You are too great to let anyone stop you from sharing your greatness with the world. Don’t ever give anyone or anything that much power over your life. Don’t ever stop because your show must go on. Be blessed.