I Am Perfuctly Fecked Up: Part I

Yesterday, I published my first post in almost 6 months.  Yay me.  Insert applause by way of commenting below if you want to clap along with me.

My hiatus from blogging started out quite naturally I guess.  I just didn’t ‘feel’ like writing.  No biggie.  Happens to a lot of us I’m sure.  This too shall pass, I told myself.  Let it be what it was for a bit, then tried to stir up the pot of creativity by trying to get myself lost in my Reader, checking out the Daily Post’s Ebook:  365 Writing Prompts, and just reading random stuff wherever I could find it.  All great reads to be sure but nothing that set off the spark again.

More time passed and I actually forgot that I wasn’t writing.  I was somewhat used to it.  The book I am writing has had its phases from frantically trying to type as fast as my brain was thinking, to having to use the Windows search feature to even find where I have some of the book’s files saved.  The so-called writing experts say this is all quote-unquote normal.  Okay, so I’m normal for a change.  How grand.  More applause for self.

Suddenly, the holidays were here and I still hadn’t written anything of creative content other than some pretty darn good fall of your chair while laughing and holding your phone text messages to friends, family, or foe.  At least my outstanding sense of humour hadn’t been foregone.

But all laughter put aside, I was sad.  Had I lost it?  The passion, the dream, the knowing in all of my being I would one day be able to call myself a writer?  What had happened?  I had no clue.  Nothing in particular that I can recall, no event or change in circumstances that would limit or prohibit my ability to write.  It just happened.

Then the shame set in.  A sense of obligation to you my readers and to myself as well created guilt for not following through.  But I didn’t just feel bad for what I had done, or not done to put it more precisely.  Guilt mixed in with a few cups of fear and a smidgen of low self-esteem cooks up pretty quickly into a dark batch of shame.  I didn’t just feel bad for doing something I wasn’t proud of or happy with – I must be a bad person for doing it in the first place.  Big leap I realize but that’s sometimes where my mind goes.

Okay, this is getting a little heavy.  Let’s lighten things up a bit.  Want a good chuckle?  Visit your Drafts or maybe even your Trash folder.  Read some stuff you started but for whatever reason didn’t finish.  That’s what I did last night as I was trying to re-familiarize myself around here.  Didn’t quite LOL but it did bring a smile to my face.  Especially as I read a draft I had started with the same title this one has.

Now this post isn’t quite on track with the one I had started last summer but had I tried to incorporate all of it into one read, well I might as well have started another book.  The two posts do have come commonalities though so I will write more in a Part II follow-up post.  And no, it won’t be 6 months before I write it.  Promise.

In the meantime, to help me get back into the rhythm of doing the Daily Post’s “Daily Prompts”, I’m going to tie this post into today’s prompt = Flow.  The first thing I thought of when I read that was the classic TV show, Alice and the oh-so sassy character Flo.  My friends will attest there’s a good deal of Flo in me and I just so happen to be in the same line of trade so I shall end with a modified line borrowed from Flo …

Writing hiatus, you can kiss my grits.

 

Image source:   torbakhopper user on Flickr.com, CC BY 2.0

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