When I originally started this blog over 4 years ago, I knew better than to make any commitments, even to myself, about how often I would post. I was actually on leave recovering from hip replacement surgery at the time, and I knew that as soon as I was back at work life would get far too complicated to keep up any sort of consistent publication schedule.
I would love to be the kind of person who regularly sets their alarm clock for an early wakeup, bounds out of bed, and cranks out 45 minutes of solid writing time before work every morning.
But I’m not. Maybe it’s my arthritis, but I have never been a “bound out of bed” sort of gal. Mornings are a more gradual affair for me. I need lots of slow, “unfolding” time between when the first alarm goes off and when my feet need to hit the floor.
Nor do I manage a regular writing routine in the evenings. Some days I’m mentally done for the day by time I leave the office and head to the bus stop. I’ve written elsewhere about the fatigue that is characteristic of many auto-immune conditions. Furthermore, I actually spend a lot of time at work writing. It may not be the writing I would do if left to my own devices, but it is writing, which means by the time I get home I’m ready for a change of activity.
I fantasize about my (still long-off) retirement years when I will be able to carve out big swaths of time to create literary masterpieces.
We’ll see about that.
Because sometimes, even when I really want to write– even when I have time when I could write, I struggle to know what I want to say.
Last year, during that long period when this blog was in hiatus, I wrote this:
Please don’t ask if I am writing.
If I am and you don’t know it,
then today I have not written for your eyes
And I will have to lie.
Please don’t ask if I am writing.
If I am not, then your inquiry twists the arrow
Lodged already in my wounded voice
And I bleed silence.
Please don’t ask if I am writing.
I can’t begin to tell you
how much more there is to writing
than the marks that land upon the page.
I am out searching the forest for a poem.
I am listening for story on a downtown city bus,
I am mining my own dreams for tragedies and gems.
I am testing future footholds for thin ice
Please don’t ask if I am writing
Even if I had an answer, today
the words have other things to do.