(Please accept my apologies for having gone six days without a post here -- I am in the process of preparing to move at the end of next week, and it is a bit of a curve ball for my routines, but, well, I've been swinging a bat long enough that I ought to be able to hit Uncle Charlie by now. I'm off to the pool in a moment with a resolve to do better here).
One of my best friends wrote me an email last night, and I just called him and asked if I could quote him. He said I could.
"I am totally envious of what you're accomplishing--both with the weight loss and the blog," Larry wrote. "I don't know how you have time to write it. I am getting more and more afraid to write stuff down, and I can't actually figure out why. I can't write anything, and I mean anything. I wrote 2 pages for Randy's daughters after he died, but that was the first time in a long while. I used to do it fairly often, but just can seem to now."
I think there were about 20 years when I was afraid to write things down myself. I could write memoranda, speeches, press releases, and organizing plans, but nothing personal. And that was for a guy, me, who self-identified as a writer. I had written hundreds of pages of fiction in college, been the fiction editor of the college literary magazine, and studied with Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, and the best writing teacher at Harvard, a guy named Monroe Engel.
But I swore it off for 20 years. I thought it was because I was committed to doing organizing work instead, but there were other weird things going on. Part of it was that I was afraid if I started writing I wouldn't stop, and I was afraid I would never get anything else done. Part of it was that I had unconsciously tried to conform myself into a certain person to make my first marriage work, and either writing did not fit with that or maybe I feared that if I wrote down too much it would expose me as a fraud to myself. Part of it was that I probably resented the idea that anyone else, ever, might judge what I wrote. I am reasonably arrogant, after all.
It was all pretty weird, but it's not like I understood any of that then.
The bottom line is that I paid a heavy price for not writing, and for not writing things down, and without ever intending it this way I extracted a heavy price from others. I'm not really prepared to go into detail about all that just now, but the point is that when we are meant to do something, we damned well better do it, or eventually there will be hell to pay.
So, understanding myself a little bit more now than I did then, I can observe this: that I am afraid not to write things down.
In the past 8 years I've published four books and written several others that are in various states of readiness for publication. Some are better than others. I've written hundreds of pages of "web content" to keep soup in the cupboard.
But it has been very good for me, these past 80 days, to have this blog. It never takes me more than an hour a day between writing my posts and posting my music and tweaking this or that. It provides me with a fairly informal way of writing regularly somewhere near the "spine" of my life, of my personal story, although quite frequently it is only after I have written it that I can relate it much to my life. It keeps me relatively honest and, of course, it keeps me accountable to a very specific goal, which is to whip my ass into a little better shape than I have been in lo these many years. It is just one thing, but this one thing is working.
It helps, a lot, that writing per se does not intimidate me the way it intimidates a lot of people. Larry is a mensch, and an extremely interesting and creative guy, so it is hard for me to see that writing things down should be intimidating to him, or to understand why he might feel, as he says, "afraid to write things down." But given how weird and mystifying my own agraphia was, I shouldn't necessarily expect to understand anyone else's, should I?
Blogging makes my life much more livable. It helps me make myself who I want to be, not that I always succeed. It has helped me drop a little over 35 pounds, although I am a little displeased that I cannot yet run a 6-minute mile the way I could in 1996, let alone a 4:38 mile the way I could in 1968. It will lead me to do a fair amount of other writing, and some of that may add chowder to the soup in the cupboard.
I recommend it. It is easier than people think. I honestly believe that if more people wrote things down about their lives, the world would be a more civilized place.
It makes me think of those old commercials for Dial soap:
"Aren't you glad you blog? Don't you wish everybody did?"
I know what you are thinking. Who would read it all, right?
That's where the music would come in:
Here's a favorite of mine
Alison Krauss & John Waite - Missing You
How about a real get to work song for a Monday morning?
Because you don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde, right?
Desmond Dekker - The Israelites
Happy Thanksgiving, friends, loved ones, and countrymen.
I write like I breathe. I cannot not write. Once when working in a factory, I figured out how to get the piece work done qhickly so as to give me a 10 minute breadk each hour... I would go into the ladies room and write poetry. This kept me from going bananas!
I wonder what your friend would write if he wrote on a piece of paper, which he would burn when done, how the thought of writing things down makes him feel? No one would ever read it and it might give him some interesting internal insights.
Donna