I've been thinking a lot recently about how much I miss writing. Honestly, how much I miss myself... I can't remember the last time I really did something just for me. Strangely, I'm not feeling a sense of loss or anything about that.... Motherhood has a way of removing your need to exist separate from your child -- well at least when they're not smacking you in the face repeatedly or biting you while they're eating or crying unconsolably for hours. Haha, then you may need a bit of father-enforced separation, but in general, I don't really miss the person I was before Jonah was born. I'm happy with my life the way it is, I'm not yearning for 'me' time.
But, I have found myself thinking a lot about how freeing and joy-filled I have always found sitting and writing to be. How it makes me feel like I have a 'voice' and how precious it is to know that there are a few people out there who seem to enjoy reading my thoughts and being with me in my descriptions of life and struggles. In the past this has usually taken the form of poetry. I really love writing poems. The feeling of words just flowing through me and forming themselves into some kind of painting - maybe a clear scenic painting or maybe a muddled, confused painting of random colors that could mean a number of different things but if you look close enough you'll find meaning in it. I love that feeling! But it's been a long time since I've had poetry flow out of me like water.
I'm honestly not sure why, maybe my brain just got too involved in my efforts. Maybe I stopped believing in my ability to write beautiful things. At some point I know I felt that I'd said everything I could say about my life as it was. But I always assumed that marriage and family life would stir the stagnant pool of my poetic ink. But it hasn't. I've maybe written one poem in the last year (where I used to write 30-40 in a month). I think part of it is just that I've become afraid of failure. Afraid of making a mess in an effort to create something beautiful, only to realize at the end that it's still just a mess. I forgot that for every truly beautiful poem I wrote, there may have been 4 or 5 others that I'd written which were just 'meh.'
It's funny how attached we can be to presenting perfection. Don't get me wrong, it's important to always strive in our lives, to grow and learn and change, to make effort towards bettering ourselves. In that sense, we strive for excellence, knowing we won't achieve it, but understanding that by striving towards it we may attain far more than we would if we were striving to be moderately good. I think I got too attached to the outcome and forgot how beautiful the effort can be and how much of a sense of community we can find when we share our struggles with one another.
So I figured, since I haven't shared anything in writing in a really long time, I'd start with my blog. Maybe it will encourage me to write poetry again, or maybe I'll find I actually really enjoy blogging.. I guess we'll see :). Hopefully I'll find at least a few people who want to take this journey with me!
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