Writer? Blogger?

Earlier today, the womanchild asked what I'd written about lately. I had to reply, "Nothing much." Let's see, there's been my diet and some basically random bullshit. I miss the way I used to write. I'm guessing that part of me has been submerged in a life that just seems to get more and more complicated. Like many other people, I'm wondering why I'm still blogging and if I should continue. I've been doing this almost daily for nearly four years now. The new wore off some time ago, and I have achieved my original blogging goal of getting back into the habit of writing regularly after dropping this vital part of my life for too many years.

Somewhere along the line, this quit being a writer's journal and became just another blog. I had my fun playing with templates and HTML. I like my drop caps and having a defined look to my blog. I like cluttering up and then rearranging my side bar. This is just an excellent time wasting diversion, but I'm neither a designer nor a visually oriented person. I just don't like not being able to do something, so I had to prove to myself that I could make my blog have some visual as well as content appeal.

I think I've lost some of the writing though. I've never been good at proofreading my own material, but lately the typos, grammatical errors, deleted words and misspellings have mounted. To make it worse, I haven't wanted to go back and correct them, even after I saw the mistakes. The quality of the content has gone downhill as well. That points to the deeper, more serious problem. The quality of my thought is not what it used to be. I'm very focused on several things right now: continuing my weight loss and making other healthy changes in my life, changing jobs to regain some stability while I determine my longer range goals and how to achieve them, being a good mother who's providing a strong foundation on which the womanchild can stand in the future, and coming to closure on this marriage. Those are Big Things. They're taking a lot of time, energy and commitment, and quite frankly, though I am making progress in all areas, none of them seem to be coming along the way I want them to.

They are coming with the cost of having lost some of my creative and spiritual life. That is a huge price to pay, and underneath all the mental clutter of schedules, to do lists, the follow up lists, the menu planning, the fretting over how to present my changing self to the world, I feel that loss. I feel like I've shut down a vital part of myself. Without that part of me, I feel like I'm not really able to move securely into the future I'm working so hard to acquire. If I am not working creatively, I'm less than whole. If I'm not actively, spiritually connected to God, the universe and everything, I'm just dragging a shell of a person into a life that will still have the void I'm seeking to eliminate.

So that means one thing. I have to reconnect and integrate all these parts of my life. What does that mean for me as a blogger and a writer? I don't know. I can't give up the Big Things I'm working on now, but I have to find a way to bring my creative life back into focus. That might mean giving up blogging with the immediate feedback that's so gratifying. I'm almost afraid to do that because this has become my writing habit, and if giving up blogging means giving up writing, well, I'm screwed again. I also wonder if blogging is keeping me from better writing. By that, I don't necessarily mean writing for which I'm paid, but better writing in general. Blogging takes away some of the loneliness of writing, and even a quasi-hermit like myself can feel that isolation. It's a serious commitment to sit down at either the page or keyboard and try to write deeply and honestly, even if your subject matter is light and fun. If I continue blogging, this needs to be less of a diversion and a habit and more thoughtful again.

What to do as a blogger is a little conundrum. What to do as a person who must write to be whole is big. I look at how different my life is now from when I first started blogging, and I know that making writing a priority in my life is one of the reasons I'm healthier, more peaceful about who and what I am, and more confused about what I will do. Words hold tremendous power. They are tools of change, and I want to use them wisely.

writing, blogging