Words

I am still writing these days - most of it is in notebooks, and none of it is clean or presentable, but it's writing nonetheless. I finally committed to following the Complete Artist's Way for a twelve week cycle, so writing has been a large part of the past several months. It was a hard start, forcing myself to put words on paper every day. Not just words, but pages of words, and being the overachiever that I am I decided to use the time as a soul-search. I've been out of sorts with myself for ages, and since no one has shown up on my doorstep to tell me who I am and what my problem is it seemed time to take some initiative.

After a full three months following the book prompts and writing (nearly) every morning, I'd managed to at least clear some of the cobwebs and get rusty synapses firing. A lot of what was pouring out was ugly - pain and disappointment and fear, over and over and over. Forcing myself to write, and by writing to think, was like tearing off a long-kept bandage and releasing years worth of festering depression, kept in place by a combination of stubborn will and busy-ness. "I'm too busy now. I'll think about it later."  "I'm exhausted today - it can wait until next week when my deadline is past." I'd spent so much time pushing off thinking that I'd practically forgotten how to do it. Most of my days have been spent reacting, no thinking required, and when I look down at the calendar years have passed.

I've gone through several computers since I began this blog - from my first little brick of a laptop in college, to a refurbed desktop, a series of increasingly large and unwieldy things that purported to be laptops, and now my current desktop beast. In each transition files have been lost, adjustments made, but I've never loved any of them the way I did my original lappy. I spent ages on it typing papers, musing on life, haunting the Web for cat photos, all the while feeling totally at home. With each new machine I've become less comfortable, less familiar. My new desktop has an enormous hard drive, great processing power - and zero personality. It's not covered in stickers; I haven't even bothered to customize the desktop. Writing about things that are intimate and personal on this machine feels, well, wrong. I find myself turning more and more to paper and pen, filling notebook after notebook and tucking them away in my desk drawer, unread.