Ulterior Motive

I used to be a writer. Specifically, I used to write poetry. It was college, perhaps the most inspiring time in a person’s young life. Everything was blissful and carefree. Everything was tragic torture. I wrote every day. Most of it mindless dribble akin to the doodles on the side of class notes. Some of it had promise. Some were even published in the school’s literary magazine. None won awards or any other sort of acclaim, yet it was an all encompassing part of my life. I couldn’t imagine there ever being a time when I wouldn’t write at least one short poem every day, let alone letting the well run dry for months at a time.

Then life happened.

I was in my twenties. I came home from work to a small one bedroom apartment and ate Top Ramen in front of the television. I went out with my friends and casually dated a slew of uninteresting bachelors who mostly were looking for the future Mrs. X. I reconnected with a past college love and eventually we were in love. I lost my long time job as an editor. Then came the wedding the same year I turned 30. I couldn’t find permanent work after that so I worked temp jobs until I became pregnant. It was a blissful time marked by moments of tortuous tragedy. I survived, but seldom wrote. Occasionally a poem would emerge, but oddly it wasn’t with the frequency of those past years.

We moved to a new apartment last year in anticipation of the birth of our son. Last week I came across my journal. It had been MIA since the move. I half-heartedly had been looking for it for a while, but it never occurred to me to just simply start a new journal. Coming across the journal triggered a realization of the apathy that I have been experiencing towards writing. Questions emerged:

What happened to the passion I once felt for my writing?

Have I changed so much that it is no longer of any importance?

Have I just been to busy? Surely I’ve had more than enough inspiration the past few years.

Is this something I really want to abandon forever?

Didn’t I always say that poetry and writing was something I wanted to pass on to my children?

Can I really live without ever writing another poem or story?

I can’t answer all these questions right now. But I still can’t imagine never writing another poem. It is still important. I do want my son to know the great joy and powerful healing that writing provided to both his mother and father. I think perhaps it is time that writing becomes a higher priority among my leisure activities.

For a while now I have been blogging on MySpace, although not with any sort of regularity. I will probably republish some of those posts onto this new blog. I hope that establishing a more formal blog will give me the push I need to take writing more seriously once again. Perhaps I can even work on two novel projects that have been collecting dust. In addition to observational and anecdotal posts, I plan to also post poems, short stories, and perhaps even excerpts from one of those novels. If I don’t do this, please send me a nasty email lambasting me for breaking my word. I will deserve it.