By Way of Explanation

I’m not writing.

I’ve been through dry spells before. But, yes, this is a full-on drought that is about to turn into a dust bowl and I don’t even really know what to do about it. I’m receiving messages and emails from people I never hear from saying…are you okay?

The good news is that I am okay. I think. As an official over-thinker and charter generational member of the Paducah Chapter of Over-Thinkers Anonymous (originally founded worriedly by my mother and her mother and her mother and her mother and her mother whom we have traced back to Boston on the 18th of April in ’75 calling out after Paul Revere…”Have you had your supper??”) I am at least 50.62923% certain that I’m okay. Especially when the sun is shining. Unless I think about it too much in which case, under any circumstances, I can usually always eventually convince myself: THE END IS NEAR.

Stuff is going on in my life that is for now, I think, completely unsuitable for blogging.

Thing is, I would like to blog it. No, I would LOVE to blog it. Need to. Want to. Desperately wish I could. Daily…DAILY I experience situations that would make FASCINATING blog posts. It sickens sickens me to walk away. I can’t stop repeat repeating everything I say, I’m so unnerved by this. I have had people (smart people) turn to me and say,

“How are you not blogging this??? How?” or, “So! You this you have to blog, right?”

Trouble is, I feel like either the time is not right, the material is not suitable, the stuff would be a serious invasion of another’s privacy or, most importantly, that my mother would KILL MY ASS DEAD if I blogged it.

It’s the same old question: where is the line?

Only it is a much tougher question to answer as a single person. As a married person it was simple: Satan was my husband. I made fun of him. It was my job. Now? Satan is the Yankee Clipper. I am on my own. It is an upside down world.

The problem is the longer I do not write about my life, the more the momentum slows and I begin to lose the thread of the/my/a story completely. Do I write in another venue? Turn my sociological research into a Thesis? Plunge into NaNoWriMo (note: I’m too lazy and preoccupied for this)? Not writing isn’t really an option. I may not be writing in my blog, but I have a small circle of (writerly) friends to whom I find myself occasionally typing ridiculously long, detailed emails. I realize these communications are less about informing them and more about me sneaking in a fix so I don’t completely blow from lack of self expression. I get to a point where I’ve got to, literarily speaking, barf it up…somewhere. Apparently, I’ve reached a place in my life where writing is an essential part of keeping me sane. (Remember when Sybil had to draw “the people”?) Writing is going to happen one way or another, it seems. Ideally, it would happen here as a means to keep all three of my readers happy. Hopefully, it won’t happen on the floor of the booby hatch with a purple crayon. But wherever it happens, I can not do it at the expense of anyone else, share details about the lives of people who didn’t sign up for this little hobby of mine, or share too much about myself.

Or can I? This last item, the sharing too much of myself, is actually in question, because I, if I'm honest, in my heart of hearts, think there’s no such thing as too much. What I’m feeling may feel special to me, but it is universal. And therein is what lies at the heart of all good (or even halfway decent) writing: expressing the the commonly felt through one’s own unique experience. Telling the truth. The truth is the thing that reaches right out off the page (or screen). The thing that makes you “get” it. Even on the small scale of blogging, the truth is essential and more of me (or any blogger) is what you voyeurs want. It's why you're here right now. It’s what I, as a voyeuristic blog reader myself, want from the blogs I read.

It’s like this: tell me about you; no, really [whisper], tell me about you.

Can I tell you about me?

And the answer continues to be...right now...I don’t know.