Write On

A couple of weeks ago, my mom ran into my high school English teacher and apparently their conversation turned to "why hasn't Meg written her novel yet?"

Nice to know I have been pigeon holed right from the beginning.

I mean, o.k. I get it. Writing has always been my thing, but it's not something I really identify myself with anymore. And yes....I'm exceptionally cranky because of my blooming frustration with my anti-recovery from my surgery.

There are still days when I feel like I have so much to say, I can’t get it out of myself fast enough. It’s this burning need to express things, to be creative, to be myself. The problem though is that I get so wrapped up in what people are going to say about it (me) or think about it (me) that I stop myself. I hold back. I keep a huge part of myself hidden, protected from whatever it is that is out there and that I’m not quite ready to face.

For awhile, I had been able to use my photography as a way to break out of my old habits of keeping it all locked away. I was able to use my camera as a chisel to slowly break through the wall around my comfort zone. But photographs can only do so much.

It was the words that I missed. The way phrases are woven together into sometimes but not always neat bundles of expression. I missed spending hours upon hours putting the jumbled up mess in my head down on paper. Last fall I met someone (who was a writer himself) and he reminded why it was I wrote to begin with. He reminded me that (and this is such a cliche) if you write something for yourself, truly for yourself, everything else doesn’t matter. And as hard as that can be sometimes, it has to be done.

For a good three or four months after that conversation, I wrote furiously in my journals and notebooks. I wrote poems and soliloquies, short stories and a great series of monologues from potential characters. I participated in NaNoWriMo and loved all 12,300 words of it (even if I fell way short of my 50,000 word goal), including my main characters--LOVE them. Sadly, for reasons I still don't quite understand, I stopped. I stopped writing. I stopped thinking about writing. I abandoned my characters. My journals collected dust on my shelves and my notebooks became half filled paperweights.

Thankfully that drive, the need to write has sprung up again and so I’m going to go with it….I'm going to drag the notebooks from the shelves and fill them with words and phrases and stories that are swimming around my head. Those pages will be a sort of dumping ground for all the stuff that stuck in my head and if I am lucky, it will make sense when it is out.