A Writer Who Is Not a Writer
Someone asked me recently how I come up with the things that I write about in my blog. Truthfully, I am constantly writing in my head; it just rarely made it to paper until recently. My brain is constantly composing short articles and poems. My first college degree is in English writing. My thought was that I wanted to write for a magazine. My niche is short articles based on real life issues. I write about what I know: my life and the lives around me. I have also dabbled in poetry. I am not going to take the poetry world by storm (yes, I voted for Brandon Leake on AGT!) but it is definitely an emotional release for me. So, if I love to write so much, why I am not writing for a living?
Well, there were no blogs when I graduated college the first time for one thing. Also, to write the kinds of things I wanted to write, I would have had to make a move to New York City and try to get in with one of the major magazines which is NOT an easy thing to do! Plus, I am so not a big-city girl. I grew up next to a corn field, people. I couldn’t imagine living in a concrete jungle.
Shortly after graduation, I got a job in customer service for an internet retailer. I hate the phone. Like hate, hate. Answering the phone all day was a special kind of hell for me. Answering emails, unsurprisingly, I was totally fine with doing! I worked there for about ten months before I decided to hop on my parents’ moving wagon and see what southern living was like. Southern living was like…totally for me. My birthday is in February and my first birthday in South Carolina was spent outside washing my car. While that’s not a reality every February here, it’s not even a glimmer of an option in Pennsylvania. Ever.
Finding a writing job in a small southern town (I lived in Seneca, SC when I first moved south) was just not going to happen. I went back to school and got my accounting degree. Unfortunately, that left my right brain seriously lacking an outlet. It was fine (not really but I didn’t realize that) for a while. Suddenly, in 2004 I started writing mountains of poetry. I was going through an emotional time and poetry is often where I go when I can’t make any logical sense of things. I had fallen for a guy who was completely unavailable to me, but this emotional swing seemed…more…somehow. I don’t know if that makes sense. I was disproportionately upset about the situation. I wrote a LOT. Someday when I am feeling super brave, maybe I’ll share some of it (don’t hold your breath; very few people have seen that body of work). It turned out that I had thyroid cancer and my hormones were all swirly whirly. The cancer diagnosis another story for another day. Ever since then, I connected my best writing (yes, my best poetry is some that almost no one has ever seen) with an unstable emotional state. So, I didn’t write, as in put pen to paper, for a long, long time. I sometimes mourn the loss of all the words I only wrote in my head.
Every time I thought about writing again or starting a blog, I was overwhelmed with this feeling of panic that I was going to fall down the rabbit hole of paralyzing depression and anxiety. A decade-plus of consistent therapy coupled with the solace I have found in yoga, has brought me to where I am today. I can find joy in writing again, and in sharing that writing with people. Ironically, I am once again hopelessly in like with a guy who is, if not physically unavailable, is most certainly emotionally unavailable to me. Even more ironically, that was probably one of that catalysts that finally got me off my ass and behind my computer. Well, I am still actually on my ass as I am writing this, but you get it.
I know everyone enjoys the Ava stuff because, like, she’s really cute and there are a ton of pictures. If no one reads my personal page, I will live, but I do hope that someone out there reads this and understands that he or she can use their creative outlet, whatever that might be - writing, music, dancing, drawing, painting – to slough off some of the emotion clogging up his or her system. You don’t have to share your work with anyone if you don’t want to; just don’t be afraid to own it and DO it!
