Back to it

I used to write.

I used to make narratives about my life for the sole consumption of my friends and my family when I had neither the time nor the tenacity to keep up with everyone via a phone call or a personal chat.  I enjoyed the process, spending many hours crafting an interesting way to frame my thoughts and experiences.  Some people liked it.  Some people probably didn't and didn't bother finding the time to say so.  I don't blame them.  I tend to ignore those things which bother me.  Life is too short.

But in the end I was doing it for me.  I would have written short stories if I could have invented a tale to tell, but I never thought up a story I wanted to get out of me.  Or, if I did, I found the details too ephemeral to grasp, never constant enough to solidify.

I wrote because I was depressed.  Writing is the only activity which utilizes the entirety of my mental abilities sufficient to keep me distracted.  Every Sunday I'd sit with coffee and cigarettes and music and write about whatever kept the darkness away.  I'd write about light topics to keep my skills sharp.  I wrote about heavy topics as a means of purging.  I published as a means of dropping a milestone.  The thought that someone might read these words somehow made them more real.

I stopped writing well over a year ago, and for much of the year previous all I wrote was a bunch of school assignments which I published because I was in the habit of sharing things I'd written.  I was lost for a lot of years, and in those years my writing became a way of trying to find myself.

I'd just about made it to contentment when I met someone who helped me the rest of the way.  Then she found a way of her own, and the rest is . . . not history.  It's happening right now.  And right now I feel a calling back to the keyboard, to dig in my heels and not backslide to the razor's edge.  I made a promise, after all.