Once More, With Feeling

My childhood is littered with abandoned journals.

My inordinate love of books has long been a defining characteristic of mine, and so I suppose it is only natural that when my various loved ones are looking for a non-book gift for someone who loves words, well, it's quite frequently a blank journal.

Like many bibliophiles and school nerds, I also harbor a (slightly un)healthy, long-standing passion for stationery, and so I delighted in each of these gifts. Lined, blank, spiral-bound, book-bound, hardcover, softcover--I loved them all.

The trouble, for me, has always been filling them.

Perhaps it was that dreaded paralysis of the blank page, perhaps it's my unfortunate habit of leaving large projects unfinished, or even my brain's maddening need for regular novelty, but, invariably, I would start each of those notebooks with the best of intentions. I would write two or three really solid entries, then log in a couple of half-hearted attempts, then I would leave the rest of the journal blank, never to be filled. Eventually, the notebook would get lost under a pile of clothing or shoved beneath my bed, unused and forgotten.

When I eventually unearthed each of those barely used notebooks months or even years later, each one felt like a failure. What did it say about me, that I couldn't manage something as simple as keeping up with a journal?

I think more than anything else, it was this inability of mine to maintain a consistent writing habit that caused me to believe that I would always be just a reader, not a writer. Didn't writers need to write, like breathing? Didn't the words rush through their veins, like a river in flood, desperately searching for an outlet? I must not have had whatever special compulsion it was that those people, the real writers had. I didn't have that need, or that Gift.

But I am slowly learning that it isn't a constantly accessible, always replenishing flow of words that defines a writer, but the determination to keep picking up that pen or pulling that keyboard closer and trying again, no matter if it has been two hours or two years.

So it goes with this blog. Thanks for sticking around.