I've always thought I didn't like my last blog post, the one dated 2/22/2016, the one I wrote before I just sort of gave up writing. It felt choppy, unprofessional. This morning, however, I reread it, and I see theme, sequence, relatability. I see imperfection, but not...badness. (I have always been my own worst critic.) And for what reason did I "just sort of give up" writing? Time. Mostly time. Criticism. The world is full of it. The thing about criticism is I've heard it all before. In my own words in my own head, so I get to take that back. I get to own that, and I get to hold those thoughts over here in my left had while in the right hand I hold the Truth that the greatest thing we can give others is our Story...and "[j]ust because someone has already said it doesn't mean you can't say it, too, [because] You saying it may be the first time someone finally hears it" (Emily P. Freeman).
From a "writer" perspective, I used to love to write short stories. I won awards through school for my writing, was published in the local paper, and earned money for it. My high school English teacher begged me to write the class graduation speech. I wasn't chosen, but it was quite philisophical - about water and sand, how things change, and how things stay the same. In college, I took a creative writing class. I wrote a poem about a tiger I had photographed at the Kansas City Zoo, and the professor spoke of passion, conflict, and imagination in my narrative. It made me laugh. A classmate leaned over and suggested, "it was literally about a tiger. Wasn't it?" And we laughed out loud together. But then, nothing. My voice grew silent, and I didn't write for a decade, until the blog - where I wrote for almost a decade, and now it's been that long again. (Or four years. Apparently it's only been four years.) But not being a writer, not allowing the words to stop growing swollen, sloppy, and stuck like fermenting nonsense at the bottom of my brain and instead rise up on wings like eagles and soar, float, and swivel on the air currents of Life ... is a paralysis that I shed. I choose, right now, today, to acknowledge who I am. I am a writer. I will call myself a writer. And I will write. This is my re-beginning. This is where the timeless sand and the water may change, but indeed one thing remains the same: I write.
