Meeting the Blank Page

On Discomfort and the Quiet Practice of Showing Up

Some days, the blank page feels less like an invitation, but more like a test. It sits there, still, unmoving, waiting to see if we can meet it. Even those of us who live by words — academics, journalists, and writers of all stripes — aren’t immune, we still falter. Because the silence of the page isn’t empty. It’s full. Full of everything it could become, but hasn’t yet. That’s what gives it its power over us. And its weight. Why can a blank page be so unnerving?

Perhaps it is not the absence of words, but the openness of words. The page could become anything. There are no contours, no limits, only infinite possibilities. And with that, the quiet suggestion that what we choose might not be enough. It doesn’t guide, it doesn’t constrain. It waits. And in that waiting, it asks us to decide: not just what to say, but where to begin, and how to shape something out of nothing. That open-endedness, that freedom, is not always as liberating as it might seem. Quite the contrary, it is often paralysing.

Maybe our task isn’t to quiet the fear. Maybe it’s to learn how to move through it, sentence by sentence, line by line, until the page begins to close in around something meaningful.

1. When Discomfort Feels Like Failure

We tend to treat discomfort as a warning, as though it signals danger. But discomfort has many faces, and one of them is newness. When we enter unfamiliar territory, when we ask our minds to move in directions unlearned and unchartered, we meet resistance. And this resistance is easily mistaken as failure. We take the tightness in our chest, the faltering rhythm in words, the awkwardness of our first attempts as signs that something is wrong. That what we are doing is not good enough.

But more often than not, the unease is just the shape of learning. It’s the feeling of unfamiliar ground beneath our feet. Of course it feels strange. It is supposed to. That’s what the mind does when it’s being rewired, when it’s asked to build new pathways, to understand new things. It slows down. It hesitates. It resists. The mistake isn’t the discomfort. The mistake is thinking that it should be different.

2. Skill Power, Not Will Power

Here is where skill power comes in. Not willpower, the forceful push against resistance, but skill power: the quiet, accumulative force that builds through repetition and dealing with what is in front of us. It is not about brute strength. It is about the practice of returning. It is about the habits, the small techniques, the subtle muscle memory that allow us to keep moving through the unknown without being undone by it.

Skill power doesn’t erase the unease. It gives us a way to meet it. It reminds us that what feels like failure is often just unfamiliarity. And that the work is not to feel fearless, but to keep going despite the feeling. To keep showing up. To keep beginning, again and again. With time, the mind stops panicking. The blank page becomes less of a test, and more of a place. Still blank, still open, but not entirely unfamiliar. Not always comfortable, but navigable. Known. And eventually, maybe even inviting.

3. Rhythm Before Readiness

The idea that we need to feel ready before we begin is one of the most persistent myths we carry about writing, or any form of deep work for that matter. As if some internal switch will flip, and the doubts will lift, and the words will arrive fully formed. But readiness rarely comes. What comes instead is doing. Not a lightning strike, but a pattern. The kind that is built not by inspiration, but by presence. By sitting down again and again despite the tension, despite the doubt, despite the quiet, persistent urge to do anything else but this.

This, too, is skill power: not only the techniques we learn, but the trust we build in our own continuity. That even if today’s words falter, we will return tomorrow with a slightly steadier hand. That we will try again. And that trying is itself the work.

Skill power is not loud. It quietly turns chaos into habit, turns anxiety into structure. It gives us something to lean on when the clarity wavers, because we know and trust it will come. The blank page may always carry a trace of fear, but with practice, the fear becomes familiar. And that familiarity becomes its own kind of confidence.

4. Writing Through The Discomfort

This isn’t to say that the discomfort disappears. It doesn’t. But it becomes less disorienting. We begin to recognize it not as a threat, but as a signal. A signal that something is taking shape. Something that is on the edge of articulation. And that’s where skill power meets courage, not in the absence of fear, but in our decision to write through it. In the end, we don’t need to conquer the blank page. We don’t need to overcome it, or master it, or make it small. We only need to meet and greet it, with whatever we have got that particular day. Our half-formed thoughts, our half-baked sentences, our imperfect ideas. We show up, and we begin. And then we begin again and show up again.

That’s where the writing and thinking lives. Not in the certainty. Not in the comfort. Quite in the contrary, in the quiet unformed space and the practiced act of continuing.

5. Some Tips For When Are Stuck

• Lower the bar, raise the frequency
  Don’t aim to write well. Just aim to write. One sentence. A few lines. A list of words, even. We’re not carving masterpieces, we’re gathering the raw material. The sculpting will come.

• Name the discomfort
  When we feel the weight of resistance, it helps to name it: “This feels unfamiliar.” That simple acknowledgement softens its grip. It shifts the story from We’re doing it wrong to we’re doing something new.

• Make it routine, not heroic
  Writing doesn’t have to be a burst of creativity. Choose a time, protect it, and then write whatever comes up in your mind. We don’t need to feel inspired to show up. We just need to show up.

And maybe that’s the simple truth hiding beneath it all: what begins as impossibly hard, softens with time. The thing that feels jagged, weighty, unwieldy — writing, starting, showing up — eventually begins to become a habit, a routine. But not because it changed, but because we did. We paid attention. We gave it our time. If, instead of fixating on how daunting it felt at first, we gently turned our attention toward the fact that it will feel a little less daunting tomorrow, we might find the edge of fear gives way to something steadier. Not comfort, necessarily. But rhythm. Familiarity. A kind of quiet momentum that makes the work not easier, but more ours. The blank page hasn’t changed. But we have.

6. Stay Connected

If reflections on writing, research, and the slow work of shaping thought into form speak to you, feel free to subscribe below. This space is for all of us figuring it out as we go.

And if you’ve found a rhythm that steadies you, or if you’re still searching, I would love to hear how it feels from where you sit. Even when it seems like we’re doing this alone, bent over desks in quiet rooms, we’re not.