Working By Emergency Light flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
For quite a long time — many years, in fact — I wrote on this blog every single day – rain or shine. For some of those years, I was even known to post twice a day. I know. I know. What was I thinking? I was thinking that writing here would oil the gears of my imagination, and open up other writing ideas.
It did.
This blog (which is also my own personal digital archive of ideas and thinking) became a place to plant and nurture seeds, to try out new ideas, to think through whatever it was I doing. Comics. Poems. Songs. Stories. Essays. Whether the audience was myself or others who were stopping by or reading it on RSS, my blog has long acted an extension of my writing identity, a place to land each morning, getting centered and situated, before the rest of the day began.
But the past few months have altered my relationship with my writing here. I’m trying to sort out why.
Maybe it was just that I have been worn out by teaching this year, as so many colleagues have expressed as well. I surely am exhausted and frustrated, and summer break can’t come fast enough (a little more than two weeks). Most days at school have become long, difficult days with a growing range of student behavior and mental health issues taking up so much of my time and energy, trends that no doubt can be traced to the Pandemic and the disruptive years behind us all. Knowing that reality and the source of it all doesn’t make any day ahead any easier to navigate. Sleep is also an issue, as in not getting nearly enough.
At some point — and I think it was in March and April, when I was joining some activities around poetry and also finishing up the daily Slice of Life challenge — I just took a break from the blog’s daily writing one day, and that break kept on going and going and going.
Now it feels a bit as if the break has broken my blogging.
I have still been writing small form poetry every morning, and I’ve been posting the odd book review (mostly written earlier, and then pulled from my draft bin) and sharing silent photos for Sundays here and other odds and ends, but I have not been doing deep dive writing about the topics that I have long centered this blog around — teaching, writing, music, art, collaborations, etc.
Strangely enough — and somewhat alarming to me, the writer — I hadn’t even noticed the absence of my reflective writing voice, that voice I’ve developed here at my blog over years, until … well … I did. I suddenly noticed what was not there anymore. I’d look at this space and it felt like some distant echo of the writer I was before, but I couldn’t quite hear it anymore. When I am not writing regularly, I find myself on a day-to-day survival mode, as opposed to being able to step back and see the larger landscape.
I’m now attuned to the absence of that voice and I miss that part of me.
So, now what? I am not ready to be writing here every day, all over again, and maybe that era of me as a daily blogger is long past. I’m actually OK with that, if I can still find a strategy for nurturing my writing self. I need to find a connection back, to spark the creative spirit that nurtures me as a teacher and a writer and a creative person. I know I have teaching colleagues and I have writing friends, and others in my collaborative circles, that I can connect with, and get support from. Perhaps summer break will be what I need.
I’m mulling on where to go from here, and how to find myself back to the writer I want to be.
Peace (and self-care),
Kevin