Even though I’ve been posting daily, my normal at-least-500-words post, I haven’t been writing daily. Not for the whole weekend. I posted stories I had already written for other things. Which is fine, the idea is to steadily increase my posting streak. But my other commitment, that I must write daily, has become a little rusty. So here I go, showing up again, trying to write and get back into the habit.
Two days might not seem long enough to fall out of a habit but I can feel the resistance to writing building up even in that short of a time. The main reason I stopped writing is because of the complaint I always start out with: “I don’t have anything to write about.” Look back over this blog, over the recent long streak, or even farther back, and you will see me write over and over again, I don’t know what to write about, nearly always in the first paragraph of a post longer than the 500 word goal.
And sometimes those posts are about something real. If I just sit down and start writing, I can pull out the most amazing interior feelings and turn them into a story or a thoughtful ramble with a point to make. The complaint shouldn’t be “I don’t have anything to write about”, it should be “I don’t want to start writing.” Because just the act of starting will almost alwasy transition into real writing. I just have to begin and the charge, the flow, the creativity, will flow from whereever it exists in my body and mind and animate my fingers into touch-typing out and filling my screen with an interesting post.
Interesting to me, anyway. I am as much a witness and reader of this blog as I am a writer and creator. I don’t always know where an idea will go if I just sit back, open the tap, and follow the path that opens up before me.
I’m still going but this doesn’t feel like one of those posts. Not yet. I’m three-fifths of the way to my goal and it doesn’t feel profound. That’s fine, that’s okay. I just have to show up. There are several posts on this blog about that, too. Showing up is the most important part. I need to write even when I think I have nothing to say. I need to write just to see. I need to demonstrate to myself that I don’t have to censor myself. I can draft, I can free-form. It’s all good and valid.
Maybe this isn’t the best for SEO or traffic. I don’t really care about that. I can tell that about 80-100 of you stop by every week to see what’s here. I can tell you read the most recent posts but you also poke around in the backlog. I don’t see a lot of search engine traffic so I can only assume you’re here because you like what I write, or you like me. We have a connection, reader, you and I. And I appreciate that so much. More than I can express. Thank you.
The pause is over, back to writing regularly.
Poignant.