write even when you don't want to

I was thinking about my last post a few days after I'd written it, reflecting on the fact that while I'd been conscientious in maintaining this blog I had completely stopped my journal writing. I've been journalling in one or other form since my early 20s. But I stopped about three years ago. The personal is too personal to write about. In my head the blog is for my PhD experiences, the ones I am able to share with the invisible but every present audience. My paper-based journals meant to occupy a more personal space reserved only for me and whoever gets to read it one day when I'm too old to care or dead. I know the reason why its been harder to write in my journals - because what I have to express is too immediate, personal, too painful - the kind of stuff I don't want to reflect on because by reflecting, it all becomes too real and I'd rather it be tucked away in the recesses of my mind. But for that very same reason I also know how important it is to write about those very things I want to forget or turn away from. You need to write even when you don't want to. Here my personal writing and my academic share a common connection. A few weeks back I spoke about being inspired to write. I haven't done anything yet, but the urge and push is becoming stronger. I want to write, even though I don't really want to and I feel this urge is driving me forward. The urge is so tangible that even though I know whatever I'm going to write will be crap, in the first instance, I don't care. The desire is there to do it anyway. I'm on a short break from work for the next week and hope I will concede to the need, desire to write, to create time to spend in my calm, familiar writing and research place. Push myself to do what certain parts of me don't really want to do. In this way the academic writing always has some leverage over the personal. If only it were so simple to rouse my personal writing genie.