[No Subject]

“Hey, are you not doing your monthly blog post anymore?”

I’ve gotten this question a handful of times and I’m unsure how to answer. On one hand, it was only meant to be a year-long adventure; it seemed sustainable (and in all reality, it is sustainable) but moving into 2017 with such uncertainty towards to state of things, I didn’t know how to make that commitment again. On the other hand, I learned more about myself in 2016 through the writing. How could I not continue on?

As writers do, I backed myself into a corner and resolved to not write at all. Bits and pieces of writing came out at times but nothing coherent. I wouldn’t label it “writer’s block” as much as I would label it purposeful lack of practice.

I thought maybe it would be good to not write. Maybe it would make sense, instead, to explore different things: human emotion, what we do when nobody is looking, art in times of chaos, and so on. These things that everybody experiences but nobody wants to talk about.

See, the truth is that everyone expects writers to have it all together. How could they not? How could we not? We carefully craft words in such an arrangement that makes people nod their heads and clutch their cups of coffee tighter. We string together sentences that make people feel things. To some, us writers have it all figured out.

We don’t.

There are days when the writing doesn’t come. When quiet takes over. When silence is louder than the taptaptapping of my keys.

There are times when the writing is pouring out of me, most of the time it’s a jumbled mess, and there are times when I’ve become inspired to explore wonder. Any given moment, I’m transitioning between feelings–from thought to a held feeling–and it’s typically something I’m trying to make more sense of. I compartmentalize different thoughts or emotions, placing them in neatly-organized boxes on this shelf of my mind so as to bookmark my place in each of them and come back later.

I laugh when I’m not supposed to. I cry when people are watching. I fidget when I don’t know what to say and I appreciate the silence that others give me when they are struggling to find words.

“I really enjoy your monthly articles. They give me hope.”

I’ve been struggling with what this means.

Hope.

In a time when this world is shifting so quickly into a place where hope cannot easily live, how do we become hopeful? How do we commit to making things better if we cannot fathom tomorrow being filled with hope and wonder?

With my writing, I’m often practicing my existence. I’m exploring areas of myself or my world that have come into focus in one way or another. These are usually things that I’ve felt deeply about but can’t always make meaning out of. More often than not, these are things that scare the shit out of me. And they should.

I’m not trying to live my life clutching tightly to the railings. I’m intending to fall a number of times, to fail, to disappoint people so that I can learn how to get back up again. Feeling deeply will likely always be a part of me and I intend to embrace that.

At the end of any given day, you can find me collapsing exhaustedly into my messily-made bed, pulling the covers up to my chin, checking my alarm, and clutching a book. Some days I don’t actually open the book. It’s there to motivate me to read a bit before bed but on the toughest days, just holding the book is enough. I’m holding a world in my hands. A story. The lives of characters, of people, of lives already lived that are trying to teach us something. I wake in the middle of the night and the book is usually beside me. The bookmark is nowhere to be found. I’ve lost my place.

“Are you writing at all?”

I can make a case that I’m always writing. It just doesn’t always show up on the page or the screen. We all are writing. Every day, it’s something new, even if it’s not. It’s a new chapter or a new place to start, even if it’s the same place you always start in.

I have a place to keep fragmented thoughts or sentences. More often than not these fragments are poems. It’s just how my mind works; how can I tell a story or narrative using fewer words? How can I tell you all about a thing without mentioning that particular thing? It’s not that I want to do less work, it’s that my mind has been trained as a creative writer to evoke thought or emotion via enjambed lines, couplets of information, and rules thrown out the window.

To answer the questions, yes. I’m writing. It’s not a monthly post, but it’s writing. It’s not published routinely or on a schedule, but it’s writing. It jumbled and mixed up, but it’s writing. It doesn’t flow well or seems out of order, but it’s writing. It’s not published on a big platform or with strong following, it’s not the featured opinion piece, it’s not a string of researched-based thought.

But it’s writing.