You know, you write a blog. You figure nobody reads it. You back away for awhile, because life is picking up speed, life is stabilizing, life is hovering just above the ground and balanced perfectly and you don’t want anything to disturb it, you don’t want even a sparrow’s flap of the wings in Taos to result in even the slightest wind to the side of your life, because everything is hovering just so nicely. And no one reads it anyway. And you haven’t had much of an Internet presence in the past few months — and you’ve done that on purpose, really, because you have a life now that you’re invested in, that you want to build with sturdy roots, but that life is fragile and precious and you’re worried that perhaps it cannot survive the Internet. Because nothing else has before it, not in your experience. You want this so badly. You want it to survive. You assume you are growing up. You assume no one notices, that you can and will fade away quietly into a life you always wanted but never imagined, a life far away from the public gawking you aspired to inspire years ago.
And then a reader reaches out — a reader you’d never heard of before, never met — to let you know that she’s reading. That she loves your blog. That she admires you.
And you remember that none of this existed in a bubble. It felt like a bubble, it became steamy and claustrophobic and putrid like life would, you assume, eventually, in a bubble, but it was not a bubble. People were reading. People cared. Even when you didn’t care, people cared.
And you love to write. And “love” seems like a misnomer for what you do with writing. You need to write. You are lost without it. It is the process through which you communicate with something that fills you with joy and with hope and with pride. It is your voice. The voice, perhaps, is the medium, the medium through which you can communicate with something so much broader than yourself.
You love to write more than anything else in the world and at this point, at this crossroads, as this bubble is bursting, is soaping up the floor around it and you’re wet and, you assume, about to get very itchy, the only thing you can think about is that you want to write. That you need to write. That the only way out of any of this is going to be to write. To write as you, to write the truth, to shut out the world and the rules and to write. That is the thing you do best in this world and it is the only thing, really, that gives you joy and pride. The world can take everything away from you, can take anything away from you, and you can still write like this. And you’ve missed it so dearly.
I am back. And I thank you.
I will start writing my #nanowrimo work right here, on this blog, beginning tomorrow. I will need to write approximately 2000 words a day to finish my 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. I don’t have a plot or characters. Or a location or a time or anything at all. But they’re going to play out here, in front of you, every fucking day. Because, damn it all, I am here on this planet to write. And so I will.
Suggestions are welcome in the comments.
And thank you, thank you immensely, to the reader whose tweet, today, reminded me of what I love to do.
