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The blank canvas stares back at me like a mirror, hard and cold. Its reflection is scrutinising, I can hardly bear it. Worse still, its silence nauseates me. Unsure, I continue to stare back searching the blankness for something, anything! My act, though full of artistic intention is futile, it only serves to amplify the silence and blind me with its gleaming whiteness. A void; avoid the void I plead with myself...yet, my mind travels towards it at an alarming speed. It begins with self-doubt, my no-goodness and good-for-nothing self has hijacked my founding optimism. The canvas looms, ominous. Intimating but never intimidated. I recoil in fear and uncertainty, unable to make a mark on its untouched roughed up surface. It notices my failing and challenges me to a mental duel – I hesitate. It hits first and jabs me with gut-wrenching inadequacy, speaking to me in a cruel, unforgiving whisper, “You’ll never be good enough”. Worthlessness consumes me, my potential to ruin stunts any creativity that might have been my salvation, my saving grace. I try to retort but cannot find the words or articulate their meaning. Language can not save me now. It has taken sides and acts as a barrier between me the words I seek. I am abandoned by language, left alone in a vast chasm of unfathomable symbols and indecipherable chaos. My mind tries to fight back, an attempt to mark the canvas, but it is too weak, too defeated now to go on. I become as blank as the canvas itself. It exudes nothingness, projecting itself onto my own life, reminding me that I too, am finite. I can not beat it. I will die. As my anguish and despair intensify, I can not control my inaction; an existential crisis of sorts. This does nothing but encourage my frustration and paranoia. “I’ll never be good enough” I cry. “It’s all pointless” I weep. Tears fall, eyes swell, my vision blurs. Uncontrollable sobbing replaces my indignant cries of inadequacy. This continues, as it will always. Absence of sound and thought create echoes in the caverns of my mind, what was once there is gone, forgotten. Distraught, I have no choice but to accept my fate. I am human, doomed to live and die alone. What am I if I can not express or articulate myself? I know the answer all too well, it is insufferable and it consumes me every second I am alive. It sits there uneasily, awkwardly, like an unwanted guest within my consciousness. The answer whispers to me loud and violent. I am nothing. An insignificant entity. If I possess no words, have no actions, own no instument to communicate- then I am defeated! The final blow knocks me to the ground, I seek comfort in the foetal position but it is too late. I have lost. The blank canvas reigns over me once again. It remains untouched and immeasurable, whilst I obediently fall into the abyss. Exhausted, I give in to the calm, the empty...the nothingness.