I love for my writing to be tidy. I crave organization and structure and plans and I have to learn, over and over again, that those are all ways to kill the creative impulse, and especially to choke out the good stuff.
I wrote a lot here when I started, for many reasons. I wrote several times a week. It was desperate. It was the clearest and most direct outlet for so many things that were pent up in me, struggles and thoughts and emotions. It was fairly anonymous, which is enormously freeing. It was the only way that I knew to move forward. It terrified me, which meant that it was right.
Over the years, I’ve come and gone. I’ve written in bursts and then let a solid month fly by in silence. I’ve had the epiphany lately that the expectation (and ensuing feeling of failure) is stifling. Can I tell you something ridiculous? I have this massive electronic to do list (I use Toodledo if you’re curious about such things). One of the functions is that you can create a recurring task, which is really handy for things that I need a monthly or weekly reminder to do. But for the last year, I’ve had “write a blog post” as a task that recurs every other day. OBVIOUSLY I have not actually been writing a blog post every other day. It’s totally mad. I don’t know what purpose that task serves other than to make me feel like a failure who falls short (every other day). So yesterday I deleted that task from my to do list.
I’m still here and still strong and I want to release the guilt from this place. I’m doing that by building another place with a clearer structure and purpose, one that I’m desperately wildly excited about, a place where the schedule fits. (Here’s the moment where I say: I have a new blog! Can you handle TWICE AS MUCH of me? I hope so.)
