False start, Fresh start

Hello again & thanks for being patient with me. I didn’t mean to take such a long hiatus from the blog. A ton of life has happened this summer, but more honestly I’ve been avoiding the whole writing gig. 

In a nutshell, I let someone else’s opinion matter more than it should have…like way more. We were discussing an essay I had written & with all the gentleness they said, “…some things can’t be explained.” A comment that I agree with 1000%. But on that day, at that precise tenth of a second, their innocent lil’ comment lasered through all my usual defenses and pissed me off. 

I had spent the entire day writing, EXPLAINING, myself in this essay. I poured myself into every word. I cried while writing parts of it for pete’s sake. How dare they dismiss my heart and hard work like that? Their friendly point was “life is mystical, don’t you agree?” (I do) but what I (wrongly) heard was “why are you even bothering writing this?”.  Even though that’s not what they were saying, I didn’t have the energy to stand up for myself. ….not in that moment, not the next day, or the week after that. 

I stopped showing up. I started second guessing myself. I felt small. I stayed in “what’s the point” land. I got lazy. 

Then I read illustrator extraordinaire, Rebecca Green’s recent blog post “Hello from a perpetual false starter.” …And it was like turning around and realizing that I wasn’t the only one riding the struggle bus with a backpack full of false starts. 

So hallelujah and praise the lord for back to school season. I don’t have kids, but all those fresh start vibes have rubbed off. “I’ll take 3 college ruled notebooks and five packs of new Pilot Extra Fine gel pen’s, please.” 

I can’t promise I won’t fizzle out again. I’ll probably end up writing another identical post like this one sooner than I’d like to predict, but I like to think I’m still building up resilience and perseverance along the way. After all, even with this baby steps I’m still further along than I was a year ago. So with that I’m going to shake off all these false starts, and commit to showing up more so than before. For real this time. ;)

(Workin’ on posting More Marrow Chapter 3 , promise!)