Long time, no blog.
For those of you who have followed previous iterations of my online writing presence, it probably came as no shock to you that I went deep and quiet the past couple of months. I tend to do that. I've tried journals, I've tried vlogs, I've tried many serial creative projects like blogs before, and I've always ended up sort of letting them fizzle into nothingness.
This time was a bit different, though, than those other things that failed like an air mattress with a pinhole. This time, I didn't gradually forget about the blog, nor did the promises I made to myself to keep writing suddenly stop mattering to me. This time,
I just got scared, and I'm genuinely sorry about that.
I actually thought about this blog and considered writing something for it probably every day or every other day over the past few months. I would muse to myself about something odd that I experienced or some story that I could tell, and I would think, "I could blog about that and that would be good because I haven't blogged in a while." But it never happened, primarily because, right after such a thought would occur to me, a second thought would chase it that went something like, "That would be really hard to make into something worth reading," or "I'm not sure I'm really that good of a story teller anymore," or "I don't want to sound so whiney and complainy on the internet, where everything I do is eternal and forever."
This last thought would come on days when I was being pessimistic about the world. I must confess, those days have been coming more often lately, and they often cause me to view, not only the common, everyday evils of the world, but also the painful, personal evils of my own life in very stark contrast to the ideals that I wish I could see around me and within me. This made it hard to write because I couldn't think of funny things, I couldn't think of goodness or uplifting stories worth reading, and I constantly convinced myself that if I wrote about the darkness in my head, readers would roll their eyes and think, "Oh, there's another disillusioned twenty-three year old, unhappy and angsting over the
vast amounts of world that she's seen and the
sheer mass of life she's lived. How original. I'd rather watch
another cat video."
I'm sorry for all this pessimism that has crept into my thoughts. It's not something I think I could have controlled (let me quickly reiterate for you all that 2013 has been a very painful year for me and a mind's reaction to pain is not easily controlled without practice that I haven't had in my cushy life) but it has nevertheless robbed me of substantial...well, Me-ness, and I desperately wish that could have been avoided somehow. It hasn't been fun for me, and it hasn't been easy for the people around me, and these unfortunate side-effects of life on Earth are generally not things we laugh about later.
But I'm happy to say that, for now at least, the cloud has passed. I can't explain it, but this past weekend, while spending Thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family in Michigan, a change sort of just happened. It wasn't like a revelation occurred to me, a distinct thought or feeling passed over me, or an experience I had jogged me out of my prolonged negativity. There isn't a moment or an understandable instance that I can point to and say, "There's when I got better," especially since I doubt that I am "better." When one is in the doldrums of life, one does not experience a single moment of clarity and suddenly escape it.
Nevertheless, I can say that I am less scared now. I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes. I feel ready to write on this blog again--among other things that I was scared of before. Not only that, I am itching to try out some creative ideas I've been putting off. Because they are in half-baked mode now, I will not elaborate, but I promise: once they're underway, you will be the first to know...if you continue to read this blog.
For now, it will have to suffice for me to say that I am back, and I've got some stories to tell. Stay tuned for more.
Mary Margaret
