Oh, hey, my other blog. It’s you. I think I remember you. I’m sorry I’ve neglected you like…an alleyway dog? A February workout regimen? A child in his formative adolescent years?
What else does one neglect?
I could make countless excuses why this neglecting has occurred.
“Your Other Brothers is growing too much and demands more of my time from me-projects.”
“Finances have never been tighter as the world grows more expensive, as my rent and healthcare grow more expensive, and I need to focus my energies on outlets that can provide income, not a blog.”
“My grandma died, I’ve been without a car for over a year now, I’ve lost some friends, and I generally feel apathetic about hobbies and meaningful time for myself.”
All of these things are true. Not necessarily valid reasons to skip blogging, but true realities nonetheless over these last many months.
At the end of the day — or, rather, at each day’s sacred start — despite all the excuses or hard realities, I must ask myself this question: am I a writer?
Do I still self-identify as someone who writes? Because if I’m not doing that regularly — writing — am I, by definition, still a writer?
Blogging on this site, of course, is only one of several potential writing outlets. I also write blogs on YOB. I write benedictions for our podcasts. I write monthly newsletters for this site. I write short stories and content for future books. I also write journal entries and therapy exercises. I may even write poetry or song lyrics.
The point is . . . if I’m a writer, then I must write. There is no way around this simple equation, this simple truth. Writing once a month or once a year or once an epoch would, I suppose, still satisfy the equation in the scheme of eternity, but for a sense of conviction, a sense of true truth, this writing must be more regular.
Writing once or twice a month on YOB and every few months on this blog with hardly any writing elsewhere is simply not the correct ratio.
For most of this year, I have not been congruent with my identity.
I feel far away from where I should be as a writer right now. Farther from where I’ve been previously. And further still from where I want to go.
I’ve grown especially convicted lately. Spending so much time on YOB duties. Spending so much time frantically with budgets, looking for cars and apartments. Spending so much time in loneliness and boredom and sadness and discontent.
Spending so much time not writing.
I feel sad confessing this, looking back on a 2022 that’s nearly two-thirds over now. I feel sad in my chest, sad in my heart, sad in my jaw and eyes and the place you breathe behind your throat, as I wonder what words were never born this year because I let work, finances, and emotions negate my identity as a writer.
This cannot be my legacy for 2022.
I am a writer.
And if I am a writer, I must write. Even when the muse isn’t present, doesn’t strike. Even when the other responsibilities or stresses or explosive feelings abound. A writer sits down to write despite all the reasons not to — that’s what they say, anyway.
I am proud of myself these last few weeks, though. Spending mornings in a coffee shop for all my YOB work, then biking to the basement of an old inn, free of WiFi distractions, where I’ve been writing for me, unspooling these long stifled words alongside the trickle of a fountain and garden.
Some days I write there for forty-five minutes. Some days it’s hard to unearth fifteen, twenty minutes.
I want to write for three hours a day. I want to treat my writing not as a hobby, and not even as a career, but as an extension of who I am. I write because I am Tom; I’m Tom, and I write.
But for now, thirty minutes a day is about what I have in me. As disappointing as thirty minutes is compared to three hours, I must also affirm that thirty minutes a day, five days a week, is infinitely better than zero minutes times five days.
I’m not sure if “infinitely” is the mathematically accurate word, but if nothing else it’s a poetic choice.
Because I’m a writer.
When all the fifteen- and twenty- and thirty- and forty-five-minute segments add up each week, I want to return to regular rhythms on this blog again. And certainly with my short stories and poetry and future books, projects which have been put on indefinite hold for all the excuses previously given, and probably a thousand more if I took time to write about it more.
It’s been a difficult 2022, but I want to rid myself of the excuses. Want to cut right to the heart of it all:
Am I a writer, or am I not?
