experience.

I had a meeting yesterday at work, a Saturday meeting. While I don’t love the idea of being at work on a Saturday morning, the bike ride to my office without any rush hour traffic is almost worth it. Week after week, I bike to work, and I feel more comfortable each time, but there is a degree of anxiety that doesn’t go away. There’s the tricky spot with the construction. There's navigating the street where the bike lane ends and I have to merge into the lane. Inevitably someone honks at me or yells that I should get off the road.

On a Saturday morning, its a freaking joy ride. I can relax and enjoy feeling my own legs power a machine and I can look around and notice people and trees and houses.

I work east of the river, as they say around here, so my ride includes a bridge. I pass over a wide river, sometimes populated with ducks or rowing crews. At my back, you can see the Washington Monument and the US Capitol.

As I came over the bridge yesterday morning, in that quiet space, a huge flock of birds, gulls I think, flew over my head with a rush. I didn’t even see they were coming until they lifted over the edge of the bridge. The air was still and silent and it was starting to rain. I was caught between, in too many metaphorical ways to list. I didn’t stop, but I let myself coast and I looked up, briefly hoping that I wouldn’t get poop to the face.

I am so used to reflecting on people, the encounters that make up every day life. Those are the stories that I build myself into, and the stories I think to tell. Deep in the city, I rarely think of any other narrative. But yesterday I remembered to look everywhere, to listen to everything, to notice indiscriminately. Experience is my currency. It’s all in front of us, waiting.

kidding, not kidding.

My old standby for habit forming and breaking: the calendar with rows of empty boxes waiting to be crossed off. If I can quit smoking this way, surely I can build a writing habit this way too.

aggressive.

I hesitate to make absent promises (to myself) because I’ve done it before. I hesitate, but to HELL with that hesitation. I am back, and I am here to write aggressively and often. To write until it hurts. Why? Because I feel aggressive right now. I feel an aggressive need to gather up my writing and write more and shred it all into a million pieces to rain down over me and then piece it all back together. I feel wild. I don’t look it, but I feel it.

I have written a lot this year, but not HERE and not for me. I’ve written very little for me. Enough. There’s no matter of finding the time or finding the energy. This, this place, this act, is the single most important and potent fuel for my life as a creative. This is it. If I’m not here, I’m a different sort of person. My becoming is frozen, paralyzed.

Without THIS I become complacent, passive, comfortable, weak, content (to a fault). I’m a person who goes to work, then comes home, then watches TV, then goes to bed, on a loop, forever and ever, until the end. That complacent cycle has a certain appeal, a little bit of glazed eye comfort, but it is quickly replaced by terror and emptiness.

Life is enough. The self unactualized is not enough.

In twelve days I’ll turn 29. In 111 days we’ll turn over all those metaphorical new leaves to begin another year, 2015. I am beginning to think of it as the year of change because I suspect that’s what it will be. I hope. All in a good, wonderful way.

the years.

I had a complete meltdown last month about my inability to write something the way I wanted it. The idea, more a feeling, was clear in my head. On the screen, the words were choked, trite, didactic, TERRIBLE. From there, I had another glass of wine and started freewriting. Halfway through, I closed my eyes and filled page after page in the darkness of my own head. And somewhere in my brain, those typing classes in 6th grade paid off, because I hit a surprising number of the keys correctly. What I mean is: for the most part, you can read it.

I feel like I wrote here just the other day, but an entire month passed. A month full of visitors and trips and running and food and work. It was late summer, and it was good. My swampy home (a.k.a. our nation’s capital) was unseasonably cool and not-humid. It made for plenty of glorious bike rides to work, especially on those days when everyone (read: Congress) was on vacation, and traffic was light.

It’s September now. The fall is coming. I’m ready for things that are new. I’m ready for that soul-cleansing dried leaf air. I’m ready for the rebirth of the season. And let me tell you this: I love writing here. I love what this place is. I love looking back and knowing what I thought and what made my heart hurt and how I’ve changed. Three years. It's nothing, but still....it's something.

a new thing.

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.)