I spent some time writing a post which cannot be written at the time. I have too much to say on the subject and not enough time to write. The freedom of open writing simultaneously imposes a kind of restraint because of my expectations of myself.
I have a difficult time with just writing anything that flies into my mind. I am a writer with a sense of pride!
I used to write in notebooks only. The one-subject 8.5x11 colored ones you pick up at Staples for 65 cents each on sale - or sometimes 4/$100 at the opening of school season. I'd pick my favorite colors and unconsciously plan which I would be writing in first, second, third... I'd write anything in bold, illegible script and draw pictures and dreams and write code words for certain people I didn't want to name just in case someone read them someday. There is something truer in the visceral nature of writing by hand.
It was a very important time. I did this for more that half my life consistently. There came a time when I consciously stopped writing in my notebooks because I wanted to stop recording and analyzing my life, and instead, actually participate in it without capturing my emotional response. I would very occasionally write down a dream or a vision which came to me before sleeping or upon waking. This has been the pattern now for about six years.
Interestingly, I have been consciously writing stories during that time. This is not to say there are many, but the experiences I've had in the past ten years deserve to be written in a form that requires less "me" and more "us." So perhaps this is the point where I must begin to make a commitment to writing those stories. I cannot write them here, in a blog, but it is here I can include progress markers.
I don't know how to do all the things I want to do yet: finish college, learn jazz piano, travel, live abroad, learn Spanish, make a living, write books and stories, change the USDA food commodity program on Indian Reservations, make records and make peace with the cold. Did I mention fall in love with someone who I can make a good, loving, compatible life with? This is a paragraph like out of my old notebooks: urgency and me! Maybe that's the name of my memoir. Ha!
