Anew

I haven't been much of a blogger for lo on these many years.

Perhaps because I stopped writing pretty much altogether for a long while. And then because when I did start writing again I only wrote little personal essays which were precious 1200 word jaunts into something or other that all seem a bit nostalgic and as painful as the sore spots one wants to touch to see if they are still there.

I'm so much older now and if I thought once my writing would be good and that goodness would lead to fame or fortune (ideally of course both) I don't really think that any more. It seems that the downsides of such things are easier to see once one has spent time with people who have benefited and suffered for them. It's not to say I don't have some egotistical desire to be acclaimed for my talents because I do. I like it when someone tells me they were touched by something I wrote. That is kind of the point of it all.

But on another level and this is probably why I have stopped writing for such long periods and why I realize have to start up. It's not because I have a book that needs to be finished. And only needs to be finished because I've been yammering on about it for nearly twenty years. It's not because I can turn a pretty phrase and I spend a lot of time thinking about various things and having opinions about them. It's not because I'm either clever or stupid or somewhere in between. It's because my brain makes words all the time and it strings those words together.

I'm not sure if there is a disorder that this is. Or even if maybe everyone has words rivering through their brains (sometimes I can read them as I think them. Sometimes they come in fonts.) Maybe everyone sits on a bench and then writes the experience in their heads. Or walks along a road and cannot help but string the words that describe the road. And all the time I have been making these writings in my brain I haven't been actually attaching them to the test of putting them outside my brain where they might languish like untended infants. And so they hang around in me all the time pestering me to be born.

Hang on unborn sentences, I say. Leave me alone. There is no use for you in this world.

But they pester nevertheless.

And I have decided that the only solution is to write them down after all. I have the piles of journals I wrote since I was eighteen that my ex-husband chucked into a dumpster. He retrieved them once I realized they were gone by by then some had gone missing and others had been soaked free of language and sense so they are just now the lined pages tinged with the color of my pens. I never read them anyway but I liked having them in case I might decide to read them. After those lost journals I stopped being a consistent journal writer. I'm not sure it was because of their loss or because of all the other losses that happened in conjunction with that loss.

I always insisted that there was no such thing as writer's block. That you just had to write and that would be the end of it. Eventually if you wrote enough you'd write something decent. I was as cold about that as my mother used to be about such things as boredom--for the weakminded --loneliness--for the weak-spirited --allergies--for the lazy and sensitive.

But now for nearly ten years I've hardly written while I've managed to obsess about the not writing for some portion of every single day.

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