Some writer

For someone known as a writer, I’m seriously sucking at this maintaining-a-blog business.

I have drafts of posts saved. I have ideas for posts come to me EVERY SINGLE DAY. I am inspired at least once a day to write a few words and send you to crazy places like this and this. But somehow I fail to get any of it posted.

It’s easy to point at my current life activities and say a large part of it is lack of time. Let us review. I am currently:

• working full-time (and the last month of work has been the busiest for me out of the whole year)
• taking classes for my master’s degree (and as it turns out this was as a full-time student, unbeknownst to me and j.)
• planning a wedding
• having a life here in Chicago*

(*Having a life does not include things like doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, making dinner and all the rest of that fun domestic stuff you finally realize was so not part of the equation when you were living with your parents.)

Really, though this list of look-at-me-I’m-busy is just a cover. The reality is sometimes I get scared about putting my writing — my ideas, my feelings, even sharing a funny or remarkable link — out there. But it goes deeper than that.

The other reality is that what I call my “compulsion” to write just isn’t there. And as crazy as it sounds, that is even scarier to contend with than putting my writing out there. It’s scary because it’s something I have experienced so viscerally. To not feel it anymore I can only think to compare to losing a close companion or a limb. Yeah, it’s a little hard to put into words.

Between when I was about 12 to some point when I was in my early 20s the compulsion to write was a force like nothing I had ever experienced. I don’t know whether to call it an instinct, or a drive, or even a psychotic episode. All I know is, when the compulsion came over me, I HAD TO WRITE and everything else I was doing at the time the compulsion arose was set aside so I could answer the compulsion’s call. Sometimes that call felt like someone else was driving my pen across the page and sometimes I just had stuff on my mind, a moment I wanted to record or some ideas I thought interesting enough to get down on paper.

“My pen across the page…to get down on paper…” It seems that is the difference between then and what I am trying to do now on the Internet.

I am no longer holding a pen to write, something that I grasped but that also felt like a part of my hand, no matter what writing instrument I was using. If I think about it more carefully there is a lot more going on that affected my lack of compulsion: the depression I went through at various times in my early 20s, the shit relationship I went through and extricated myself from, how much more time I spent online after I returned from Egypt in 2001 and how as I spent more time online I found reasons to ignore the compulsion. The Internet was and still is for me epitome of the idea “You can’t imagine what you can imagine.” But somehow in revelling in all the Internet has to offer, I failed to notice what my compulsion had to offer.

I can’t also forget or deny that I figured out early on that writing was a way for me to deal with the depression, self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy I experienced so deeply in my teens and early 20s. I still have my doubting and down moments, but I can honestly say I am much happier in all aspects of my life. So maybe occuring in parallel with more time online, writing email and instant messaging, was less time being depressed and hence less of a need to make sense of things by writing.

But let’s not get pessimistic about my lack of compulsion or overanalyze things here (too late, I know). I haven’t lost the compulsion completely. It still makes its presence known, even if it seems with less frequency, or with less gripping strength as my pen-in-hand days in my teens and early 20s. The compulsion did arise on my early morning brown line L ride on Oct. 7 and helped me fill about four pages of the hard-back journal I started in Egypt. That would be book number seven of the journals I have been keeping count of since my early teens. I am still hoping for another round of compulsion to fill the final few pages of number seven and pick up the journal that is waiting to be number eight.

And there it is again. I am still stuck on paper and pen. It would seem after reviewing this entry that I have not yet figured out how to make the transition from pen-and-paper journal to web log of life by typing frantically.

The rules have changed but I’ve been left somewhere in between. Still yearning to write as a way to record, make peace and play with words but still unsure how to make it happen in a place where I can’t see the ink bleed, run my hand across the smooth paper, hear the binding crack and stretch as I open my current journal book and even taste the people, places and things I am writing about because they are right in front of me.

The screen is right here in front of me and I’ve corrected all the errors as they appear. My eyes are seeing spots and my wrist hurts. And the migraine that has been building has just exploded like a super nova.

I’ll keep you posted on where I go with this…