I tend to be mostly private with my writing. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I want only my best work “out there.”
And that’s fine and good for my poetry. I’m very selective when it comes to sending out work. I have learned (the hard way, but that’s a story for another time) only to send out work I truly, actually, forever want published. So that means my poems tend to take a very long time in the gestation phase before well-done enough to pass the quality test. That’s all fine with me.
But another level of writing is the creative personal essay. I miss my LiveJournal days of the early 2000s. Remember when we had to wait for dial-up and share the Internet with the phone service? Depending on your age, you will know what I’m talking about, but as a Millennial my teenage years paralleled the teenage years of the Internet. Before Tumblr, there was Myspace and LiveJournal, a handful of others I’m now forgetting. Where teens would go to pour their heart out to the quickly developing cybersphere. I used to journal online profusely. I spent a lot of my late childhood in blog culture on the Internet.
My true nature is a writer. I write every day when I’m a clear state of mind (though there are dark periods, for sure). Since 2013, I have written 3 longhand pages every single day in a notebook - Julia Cameron’s morning pages. (If you aren’t aware of The Artist’s Way, stop reading right now and check that out.)
Here’s the problem: Doing longhand pages in a notebook every day produces A LOT of scribbled notebooks. I went through a serious Marie Kondo phase during the pandemic, and it became clear just how much space my old notebooks were taking up in the closet. Notebooks on notebooks on notebooks of my daily journaling. Word regurgitation. All just tangled up in each other. (If I ever wrote something I thought was really interesting, I’d rip the page out and put it aside to type up as an Actual Thing. But so much did not make it to the tearing out phase.)
I’m talking three big boxes and two shoeboxes full of journals—nearly a whole closet shelf.
Overwhelming!
So, I’ve recently transitioned over to doing my morning pages on the computer by using 750words.com. It’s a platform for people to type their morning pages into a digital (private) system. Not a blog. Just a word dump.
I like it so far. From an environmental standpoint, it uses less physical resources. I don’t have to waste trees with something so prolific and mundane as my daily journaling.
What a relief!
I’ll deal with my previous journals later. Maybe I’ll comb through them looking for gold.
All this to say, writing is my gift. I’ve resisted it over and over again through the years, for varying reasons. But it’s always there.
So, if writing is my gift, I need to share it.
We all have gifts. I want there to be room for everyone to share their gifts. That’s a strong value of mine, one which I work to cultivate in my teaching and community building. It’s taken a backseat as I’ve been in a long winter for the past 10 months, and I am emerging back into Creator Mode now.
I want to send more energy into the intention of creating space for the cultivation of gifts, so I naturally need to practice it myself.
I’m taking a leap and starting a blog on my website. We’ll see how it develops. Hello!
As the introductory post, I’d just like to conclude by saying that I plan to write about what feels true to me on a deep level, including curiosities, insights, and questions. I’d like this to be a place to start a conversation. If I’m thinking about something, maybe others are too. I’ll leave comments on so we can talk!
What I think about a lot: climate change and sustainability, emotional and mental health, human behavior, individual and collective psychologies, mythologies, spiritual interpretations of the world, and the creative process.
See you soon!