I miss having an outlet. I miss my old addiction to spending all morning hunched over the keyboard and tapping out an urgent thesis on my pet topic du jour. I miss being unabashedly heady and voicey and dumb and editing myself tirelessly, but not getting too hung up on anyone else’s feedback before I hit publish. I miss letting my ideas out into the ether, where maybe a person or two would read it and talk to me about it, but mostly nobody would. And that was okay. I miss the feeling of knowing something I’ve written exists beyond my laptop.
Why do I crave that? Someone diagnose me or point me to the text that already exists to explain why we do anything, why writers share their work, why artists make their art.
Yesterday I had this obvious thought that felt like an epiphany: You don’t have to be a good artist to make and share your art.
I read bad writing all the time. I think, “wow, he could have used an editor.” I text my friends: “Why would she publish this?” It has not occurred to me for a long time that *I* could be that idiot. Me!
I was a blogger once. How embarrassing. I wrote on blogger dot com, on WordPress, on Tumblr. At my most prolific, in my early 20s, I blogged about living in Europe. I did my best to scrub the evidence from the internet; my husband recently found all the old posts on the Wayback Machine.
For nearly a decade, I have worked to distance myself from being a blogger. Blog (noun) and blogging (verb)—I’ve only used these words only as shorthand for a lazy and lesser type of writing. But instead of blogging, I have shut up completely.
Practicing restraint is a useful exercise, to be fair. In my years of relative silence, I’ve made some positive steps forward—I’ve worked on developing my craft and technique, on writing in scene (not my forte!), and on giving my thoughts on the events in my life enough space to breathe and mature and come into a more evolved form, like some beautiful midlife Pokémon.
But I’ve had this nagging feeling lately that by waiting forever, I’m putting out my flame before it even gets a chance to ignite. I find it hard to write anything at all since I’ve had kids, and my patience for the glacial pace of the ~literary scene~ and all its gatekeeping is waning. Nobody is asking me to make or share my bad art—if I don’t do it now, when will I do it?
Plus, I’m seizing on a moment. It seems like we’ve come full circle on blogging. Now everyone just calls it a newsletter. Sure, whatever, this is my newsletter. (It’s not, really; I have no publishing cadence in mind, no blueprint for what’s ahead. I just need a goddamn outlet, and the tumbleweeds of X [nee Twitter] are no longer cutting it.)
So hey. What’s up. Welcome to my blog.