4: February 3, 2023

I’ve all but forgotten how to write. I sit down at my computer, flex my fingers upon the keyboard, think of how many times I’ve come to exactly this spot to make sense of my world. 

I wait for my son to cry; it’s 5:18 a.m. and he’s already been up once this morning, this morning when it was too too early to awaken, and I’m on edge. Surely, any minute, he’ll be up again and so it feels treacherous to relax into the words that may be waiting there, waiting to be called up, waiting to respond for duty. 

I read something recently from an author I like about the idea that – hell, we’re all going to die and the words will keep coming from other places, other people, so why not just write what you want to write? And that’s really stuck with me but the problem is that I’m not finding the corners of my brain that have something to say. I understand the reasons for that: my mind is taken up with other things that are louder, quite literally, but it doesn’t stop that sense of failure, of neglect, from sitting on my shoulder. 

For decades, writing has been my refuge. And I’ve left it and returned to it and nurtured it and tended to it and still I don’t have much to show for it. Only a few small publications, this blog that has chronicled my life in ways that have not felt quite satisfying enough, thousands and thousands of words tucked here in there – in files and in notebooks – that have never met another person or seen the light of day. It doesn’t have to be something; I know that. But I am disappointed in myself, on some level, this morning. Maybe it’s because I’m tired – I am always, chronically tired – but maybe it’s also me just saying aloud what I wonder if I’m allowed to feel. I am disappointed in myself as a writer, for how distracted and unproductive I’ve been, for how much I’ve wandered away from my words when they are a part of my life that have been consistently, wholly, mine. 

I started this blog to hold myself accountable to writing when I turned down a writing opportunity that didn’t feel quite right. Maybe I question that decision now; I’m not sure, I haven’t given it all that much thought. But it would have given me more formal experience and accountability and something of an audience so yes, maybe I could have taken that and gone in a different direction, developed something. This has felt like something of a substitute and something that I’ve really enjoyed at times but also, for the last few years – especially since Covid – I have felt somewhat lost on this blog.

I do my best writing when I allow myself the freedom, the wildness, to say whatever I want to say. I do my best writing when I am unafraid. I do my best writing when I am furious, when I am big, when I am unstoppable. But just now, I stopped to text my friend about a car seat situation, because my mind is always going in a hundred directions. Sometimes, it doesn’t even feel like mine. 

There are so many things I wonder about. So many things I’d like to still say, if only I could find where they are tucked away in my heart.