Becoming weary

I chatted to a friend today who is a writer. A real one. Nicki gets paid to write and has been published in the Huffington Post and New York Times, among others. I love her honest, beautiful writing and she inspired me to write more. She told me today that she has writers block and that it's pretty frustrating. I told her that I felt like a bit of a fraud saying the same thing but it's the truth. I have nothing to say.

I've said this before, when I first started blogging way back in 2008, that I would only write when I had something relevant to say. And I did. And sometimes months would pass. When I did write people would tell me to write more. Setting myself this challenge for the year was easy and I've pretty much stuck to it for 60 days, even when I was on vacation. But there is only so much I can say about my childhood, or my mother, or how I feel about butternut (I love it) and babies. I've been keeping a list of things I should write about and generally I am able to put something interesting together. But lately I've been struggling, and so I resorted to publishing some of my old high school poetry or rambling on about something that was crap (according to Keith). I like it. I like that what I say will be preserved in cyberspace for a long time. I like that things I wrote 20 years ago, some of which was published in a school yearbook, is remembered. But when you do it every single day, it becomes routine. And that defeats the reason why I set myself this challenge in the first place. 

I worry about letting myself down. I don't want to let you down. I've received such wonderful feedback to some of the things Ive written about. But even those have waned, because you can only take so much and life is busy for us all. Nicki said to me "Sometimes you want to take a break, give people something to want. Something to look forward to". 

This process in itself is a lesson for me. This is about setting goals, and sticking to promises, and learning to adjust as you go, and setting expectations, and meeting them, and not meeting them. It's about holding on, and letting go. This simple task is about so much more than I ever thought. And yet it's also not.

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