What Now?

I’ve been giving some thought to whether I want to keep posting, and if I do keep posting, then what do I post?

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While I enjoy void journaling (that’s what I consider what I’ve created on here so far – journaling into the internet void, laying bare dark parts of myself for whomever stumbles across), I want to create more than just self-reflective whinging. Not that self-reflective whinging isn’t important and doesn’t have it’s time and place – I just long to create again.

My creative skills are rusty. As a young adult, a teenager, hell even a child, I wrote constantly. Short stories, (mediocre to bad) poetry, micro fiction, et al. I wrote with regularity, and to fill a deep need to create with words. Now, I struggle to write anything. It’s hard, fighting to find core parts of yourself after years of neglect.

I have begun to push myself again, though. To force myself to write out ideas and pieces of stories, to try to find my way back to that spark that once kept me up late at night, imagining worlds and people to life. I’m going to start sharing some of those on here, to gather the scraps and pieces together and hopefully weave something worthwhile out of them.

It’s easy to forget yourself as you get older. Those little habits, little sparks that were so defining to us in our youth can easily be dampened by responsibilities and the realities of life. For so long, my end goal was to find a way to be a stable provider, to give my husband and son a comfortable life. This isn’t to say exotic vacations or designer goods; merely a comfortable home and the safety of knowing all bills are paid, all needs are met.

I achieved that (not alone, my husband and I are a true partnership, something I am very proud of), and thought with that achievement would come a sense of completion and contentment. Instead, I feel unmoored, as though in all my striving something precious was lost.

Now is my chance to try to recover that which was lost. To find the kernel of self I sacrificed along the path to what I imagined adulthood to be. I hope to grow back my passion for writing, to revive it’s browned stump into something bearing foliage once again.