On Writing

Dear Readers,

I want to write to you now – whoever you are. Maybe you read my last blog post. It’s 1:35am right now and I’m writing because I am feeling inspired to write and because I want to address my previous blog post.

I don’t think that blog post is real. It’s not me. I’ll try to explain – I wrote my previous post under pressure for a deadline, I wrote it so that I could check off the box of “write first blog post” and get it in by the deadline. Sometimes things have deadlines, and that’s life and we have to deal. I had a deadline and I dealt. But I don’t like it. I was writing because I had to write, not because I wanted to write. Yeah sometimes you have to write when you don’t want to, sometimes you have to feed the cat when you don’t want to, sometimes you have to make conversation when you don’t want to.

This is where I was at my last blog post. Am I making sense?

Right now though – I am writing because I want to write. And it makes me feel a lot better.

I started to pack today and I was going through my room, looking in every drawer and on every surface for things I maybe should bring (I’m kinda obsessive about some things). So the last place I went was my loft, where I found my box of keepsakes (or random collections of things that I want to keep) (which I have many boxes of). And I found a letter from my good friend Sarah.

It’s a happy birthday letter (I took a photo of her wonderful envelope she made – see the header). This letter inspired me. It made me feel good, happy, it made me miss my friend, and it gave me hope in happiness, hope in small things. So I began to write Sarah back, and that’s when I thought of my blog post that I wrote a week ago.

I don’t like that blog post. It is contrived to fit a model of something acceptable and typical yet somehow trying to be me. I wrote it, so maybe it’s a part of me, but it’s a depiction that isn’t what I want this blog to be like. So I’m going to try to give you (whoever you are) a real sense of me.

Here’s what I’ve written in real life to my friend Sarah:

Hey Sar – I want to write you a real letter. Sometimes without intending to, I go through the motions of things without really DOING them you know what I mean? Why would I do that in writing you a letter? Maybe because of habit – seems like a lot of life is going through the motions of things. I just read your letter from my birthday age 14. It’s a great letter – and well it doesn’t just go through the motions.

I miss you. In a real way, not just in a saying it way. I felt it in my chest when I read your letter a moment ago.

I’m not going to write the rest of the letter because a) it’s not done – and b) I had to stop writing because I began to think about typing up the letter on this blog and that affected my writing in a way I didn’t want it to.

So there’s a little piece of me (just like my last post was and is too).