Last night I looked over at my blog archive and noticed that the month of December had a sad, little 6 in parenthesis. Six? Really? Only six, huh.
There it was...a number letting me know just how low my creative reserve actually is.
I decided to start this blog sometime in June. I didn't really get started until August. When I told my parents what I was going to do they had a fit. Dangerous...that's what they kept saying. And before I knew what was happening the fit became a fight and I postponed all plans. Why was the question they kept asking. Why not keep a journal? A diary? Why not just have it be private?
They were all valid questions.
I was an odd child. No denying it. I kissed my bears goodbye whenever I left home and asked them to be good. I held funerals for browning-leaves that fell of the plants when I was dusting (a weekly chore). I spent hours in the hall closet, under the stairs. My childhood was perfection. Bliss. I grew up down the street from my public elementary school. When I got old enough to walk there by myself I would make up stories on the way. Sometimes, I spoke them aloud. Others, I allowed to silently pulse to the push of my white Keds. I used to wake up at six in the morning to get in a good hour of reading before I had to get ready. And in the afternoons when I drove with my mom to downtown Dallas to pick up my brother, I would pass the time engrossed in the Boxcar children adventure. I used to love sick days. It meant more time to read. And if I wasn't reading. I was pretending, play-acting, living in a world of a million make-believe miracles. I tried to keep a journal, but my mind moved faster than my pen and I couldn't sit still long enough to persist--not when I had a play-date in the fort across the street.
As I got older classwork and extracurriculars eclipsed free-time. I stopped reading. Writing became a task relegated to English class. And again I tried with the journal. Not much more success. The things I wrote about seemed so petty, so mundane--so not worth writing about.
And at another point acting took over. It became the greatest of my loves. But I was always aware that my passion for theatre came from my love of literature. My senior year of high school when that passion began to wane, all it took was one reading of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation and I was back, more zealous than ever before.
What I hadn't realized, until started blogging that is, is how much I love shaping words myself. Making my own life tangible--that's what this blog is about. So that ten years from now, twenty, I'll get to show my husband and my children what I was doing in December of '08. So yes, this thing could be private, but thank god it's not, otherwise I'd only write about boys and then spend the rest of the time complaining (mental note: work on that latter thing in everyday life--New Year's Resolution perhaps?). It's the same reason plays are performed for an audience--sometimes we need that outside element--it's a challenge--a call to embrace the best version of ourselves.
So... while I may now feel the pressure to actually write well, since (ghasp) people actually read this--not too many, but just enough--and this leads to a lack of posts all together--I'll work on getting back to celebrating the mundane things (since now I'm mature enough to do this (cough, giggle, giggle))--you know, back to my roots.
And who knows I may even start to write a little bit more about boys?