I am, deep down and at heart, a writer. I'm not saying I'm a great one, but I believe I am a decent one, and I certainly have long had an ingrained yearning to do so. I have many thoughts to share, many statements to make, many observations to... uh... observe.
I was on a roll a few years ago. I was writing like a mad dog, but with better dexterity on the keyboard, and less foaming at the mouth. There was foaming, though. Look back. Oh, there was foaming.
Then things changed. I wrote some deeply personal things and discovered through my wife and my friends that on occasion, It felt weird and awkward to them. I would rant about how difficult a day of juggling my workload was only to be cautioned by my wife (a former HR rep) that it might not be good to do so. I'd write about deep heartfelt issues related to parenting or fatherhood only to be surprisingly approached by a colleague who'd read it and had some thoughts to share. This wasn't a truly close friend, yet now they knew something about my personal life I might not have otherwise shared.
It was a time of change, too. I lost my job. We'll, I didn't lose my job, I mean, I know where it is and everything, it's just if I go there, there's this other guy doing it*. I got laid off. It was a tough time. My focus was not on writing, but on surviving.
I shut down the blog and in it's down state, I methodically removed all references to myself. I didn't want to encounter another co-worker who wanted to debate my political observations as I was standing in line for lunch. Sure, being let go helped avoid that specific issue playing out, but you get the idea.
Life continued. I went off, I did my business, I established a new career path, and I've since thrived. I've climbed, grown personally and professionally, and have spent the past year embarking on a soul searching effort that has been life changing for more than just myself. I hate to categorize it as a mid-life crisis but after turning 50 something clicked and I started question not only what I was doing in may aspects of my life, but why, and if it was really what I wanted to be doing with whatever time I might have left.
All along the way, the thoughts, rants, humor and observations have been building up inside of me like a latex balloon attached to a high pressure fire hose. The time has come to release this backlog and pop that sucker. My outlook has been up and down, my self esteme has been up and down, and my sense of any purpose or possibilites about the life I have been living has been very up and down. Yet my blog and my writing, the cathartic process wherein I worked out and focused on all the things that make or break my success and contributed to my own personal self worth, has just been down.
Until now.
I'm setting an aggressive goal. I want to try and quickly reach a goal of writing once a day for a full year. I was doing that before, it's not unachievable, but it will require a significant effort on my part to do so. I may need a little ramp time but if I can't find the time to jot even a simple paragraph or two once a day, I'm not taking care of myself. And that's bad.
I have decided to stop thinking about what I needed to do to get the ball rolling again. I would typically obsess about getting the right tools, a theme of images, specific formatting and style, and all that other crap that would have otherwise gotten in the way. None of that matters more than writing.
So here I go.
No pre-thought, no strategy, no established plan of action. Just writing. Again.