Somehow, Someway

Its interesting the way things work out. I used to love to write. Back when I was basically nothing. I didn’t have a big important job, I didn’t have much money, I didn’t really have anything but time. I used that time up writing and reading, reading and writing. I wrote about everything and everyone. I wrote everyday and every night and oh how I enjoyed it. I drank it up, I was even foolish enough to believe that it could be like this forever.

Far be it from me to say I was better off then. After all, I lived in a crappy apartment, didn’t have a computer, hadn’t found my life’s work yet, and I was about to get cheated on. No, life wasn’t better, but it sure as hell was more fulfilling. I was a creator, the builder and destroyer of worlds. Anything I wanted to make happen, happened. My imagination was free. It wasn’t bogged down with rent, or how horrible things at work have been. I had a voice.

Did I lose my voice? No. Not at all, but I did learn how to effectively ignore it. Things got to be more important than laying my thoughts out in a journal, or sitting to type out a few chapters for a novel. I fell in love. Found my muse, and ignored it. Its painful to think about how much better I could be at writing now if I had just had the foresight to stick with it. To sit down every night for an hour or so and plunk out some prose. But as we grow up we inevitably give up some of the things we love for other things that we love.

I have been rather lucky, though the point of this post is the ground I have lost in my writing, my writing is pretty much the only thing I have lost. I’m hoping writing is like riding a bike. Now that I have picked it back up again I hope I will soon be zooming down hills with the wind in my hair and the sun at my back. The imagination is a muscle that requires constant exercise and my imagination is a little round in the middle. The key is finding a way to balance all the things I want. I’ve seen it written and heard it said hundreds of times, “I am a writer, I write.” I need this. Here’s hoping life no longer gets in the way, heres hoping I can finally find that perfect balance.

There is a wonderful older gentlemen who lives in the apartment above mine. He has some challenges, and sometimes they get him down, but I have yet to see him give up. When he found out I was a writer, this is years ago now, when he found out I not only enjoyed philosophy but psychology, we he learned of my immense love of books and reading and learning, he became a companion, for he spent nearly ALL his time writing. We would sit, sometimes well into the night on our respective stoops and discuss whatever came to mind. He would always ask me If I was taking time to write. Sometimes I would reply “Yes, I write all the time” All the time was a relative statement of course, I had penned a few words but nothing substantial, but he would give me a knowing grin as if we were in some secret club, and ask me how it felt. I would mumble something along the lines of great and hope he left it at that. He always did, as if he knew.

Sometimes I would just say that no...I wasn’t writing, I would even admit that nothing would come out anymore. He would frown and think that over a moment, and then apologize, as if not writing was unimaginable to him, as if the very thought of it caused him physical hurt. It dawns on me now that, that is exactly what that thought does to him because he is there, “in the words”. He has very little without his writing, and as I sit here with my powerful little iBook looking around at years of accumulated “shit” I realize that until I start writing again, I have very little. I am successful, not rich by any means, but doing well, yet a part of me was dying, crucified upon my everyday life.

It’s time for my imagination to get down off that cross. I have to find a balance or lose a part of myself that I love forever....

“I AM a writer, and from now on, I write.”