It's easy for me to find reasons not to write. A couple of them are understandable but mostly they are stupid. And lies. Because the biggest reason not to write is fear. I am afraid that I am not very good. Definitely not as good as Fitzgerald, or Hemingway or Jonathan Safran Foer. Not as good as I want to be. I've tried several times to deny this part of me. To pretend that I don't need to write. I stop for awhile but I always come back to it. I get that itch that won't go away until I start again. So here I am starting again. Feeling a little bit like it's a fruitless exercise. A habit that'll never lead anywhere. But either way I have to write. It's who I am.

The Truth

I'm afraid of blogging.

It's something I should be good at. Something that's supposed to be so natural, it's paralyzing. Like forgetting how to spell an easy word when someone asks you paralyzing. Describe yourself in a job interview paralyzing. Trying to remember how to kiss on a first date paralyzing.

I read more than fifteen blogs a day and some of them are not better writers than I. But they have better clothes and filled passports and hydrangeas in actual vases on their reclaim barn wood coffee tables. And it's all real. The whole concept behind blogging is that it doesn't matter who you are, as long as you're a real person sharing your truth. These girls might have sponsors and family money and photographer friends but they are not models in glossy magazines. They really do have lives filled with the kind of glamorous things I love to read about.

My truth is not so glamorous. My truth is that I'm poor and not in a bohemian photographer buying film instead of dinner kind of way. I'm lonely and not in a gorgeously painful prose about a single cup of coffee in front of a rain splattered window kind of way. I'm lost and not in a hopeful I'm being reborn as a survivor of all this ugly stuff that happened to me kind of way.
I'm just poor and lonely and lost. Not in any romantic kind of way. The ugly truth is that I miss being told how beautiful my writing is and how brave I am for its honesty. I know that as a writer I get to pen what kind of story this is and I can tell it anyway I want. But if I'm telling the truth, my life hasn't felt like a story worth telling in awhile now. Not a story worth blogging.

                               I've been waiting all this time to be something I can't define.

    There has been a Format sized hole in my heart lately as I let one of the bands most influential to my life go unplayed for a while. Re- listening to this song feels like skipping to the end and realizing it was always going to be ok. It feels like full hearts and true friends and warm summer nights driving through the desert with the windows down. It feels the way I always did when I was single and I was spilling over with all the sweet pain of having so much love and no one to share it with, sure that the lonelieness would last forever and yet equally sure that there would be a happy ending. It feels like realizing what you knew all along, that feeling something messy and complicated is better than feeling nothing at all. That giving up on what you thought you were is how you find yourself.