When I was a kid my dad spoke Elvish on the phone all the time.

I didn't know it was Elvish back then, I was little.  But the coded messages he dictated into the receiver certainly weren't English, and by the time I read The Hobbit in middle school I became fairly certain that it was Elvish he was speaking.

That helped me understand why he'd get up from the middle of a family dinner, traditionally a punishable no-no, to go chat in tongues upstairs in his bedroom.  The Elf people were a highborn race and not to be kept waiting.  I figured my father must be a very important human to consult with a race known for their legendary hesitancy to interact with the sons and daughters of Men.

First, my blockages are specific.  For instance, if I set in my mind that I wanted to publish a new piece on my blog every day for a week, the blockage would surely come in the form of a dearth of new ideas. Now that I'm writing a book, most often the walls are between me and creating new content on any given day.  

The second advantage I have is that my personal neuroses is so strong that when the words just aren't coming to me, I usually write about what a failure I am at writing (e.g. right now.)  It usually comes out just self-depricating enough to not sound overtly narcissistic.  Though it obviously is. 

My second job out of college was as a psychology research assistant to the Medical Director of a  therapeutic community-style substance abuse center.  The MD was a small man with a big job title and while he only handed me the occasional assignment, usually web-search related, I had a bigger office than those with Master's degrees who were getting their hands dirty doing the actual work.  Those worker bees were also my only coworkers, and I liked them all without exception.  They were from all walks of life: a German-born thirty-something who put her heart and soul into developing the psychology branch of the substance abuse center,  a forty-something Jew-Bu who was both motherly and fierce simultaneously (I, appropriately, was both stupefied and enamored with her), and another young white dude my age who I sincerely can't remember anything about except that we would commiserate together until he left for grad school, or marriage, or something else equally important.  Suffice it to say, we were all pretty forthright about how ludicrous it was that I had the big office.  More than anything it was a passive-aggressive power move by the doctor to show the others who the boss was -- because he didn't have anything resembling the balls to stand up to those two women himself. You know, the women doing the lion's share of the work that he, I assumed, was taking the lion's share of the credit for. It was not an optimal work environment.