Somebody's watching

I noticed today that an old friend of mine added this blog to her blogroll. Presumably this occurred because I left a comment on her blog while signed in to my Google account, thus providing the link. Whoo-ah! -- I certainly don't mind if people know about and read my blog, but it embarrasses me a little because I haven't posted anything in oh-so-long. If I'm going to be on someone's blogroll, I suppose I ought to post to my blog.

Here's my problem: I think of things to write all the time, constantly, but I suffer from a dreadful writing paralysis. It affects all parts of my life. It takes considerable force of willpower for me to write even, for instance, a few things I've just thought of onto my shopping list. The honor roll of people to whom I owe an email grows longer by the day. My research suffers. Precious moments of personal history go unrecorded. I repeat the same mistakes, having failed to write down previous results and needed corrections.

I've tried all kinds of things (well, maybe not all kinds) to overcome the problem. I made a goal to write frequently in my (paper-and-pen) journal, with no requirement that I record all important events, but only that I write whatever might come to mind. I hoped that this would help to break the logjam and free me to write other things, too. For a while, I was doing well with the journal-writing, and I did feel better. But now I haven't written in my journal for a couple of weeks, so you can guess how well I'm doing at other forms of writing.

I used to love to write. As a kid, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I believe that I write well, and I still want to write. But how am I to overcome my current pathology? Shouldn't keeping a simple journal, or consistently replying to friends' emails, be a tractable goal?

Thoughts?