This is madness. The idea that I’m going to keep a blog.  Who am I kidding?

It’s happening to me again. I get this surge of ambition and hope and resolution and then trip over myself and land face down. And it always happens when I declare my intentions out loud. I automatically doom them that way.

Time. Time is my enemy and always has been. I don’t manage it well. Deadlines wage holy terror in my head and slay me in my tracks. I know that no one has put any deadlines upon me here, except maybe myself. I know that there isn’t any impatient, pointer wielding, red-marker carrying, instructor around to shame me about lack of productivity or poor phrasing or grammatical errors or “lack of originality” or “lack of a thesis statement”. I don’t really have any particular goals or ambitions with this thing I’m learning how to navigate. I’m not doing this for a grade. 

I should insert a short, general, disclosure here: I am seeing a psychologist and have been for a few years now. We discuss lots of things. I had a moment about a month ago in which she enabled me to see that what I choose to do doesn’t necessarily have to have any purpose other than making me happy. If I’ve always wanted to write – well, then – write! That was such a freeing revelation for me. The thought of writing – just for me. Not for a certificate, not for an assignment, not for money, not for a profession, and now that I’m remembering that, I’m starting to feel better….

This morning I was starting to feel remorse about telling a few people, with tipsy camaraderie, that I’d started this blog. Why? Well, because now I feel the obligation to keep it updated. 

(Okay. It just struck me between the eyes that I’m not being entirely truthful. I’m feeling remorse because I feel the obligation to myself to keep it updated.) 

And here is where I circle back to my idea that it’s madness. 

I want to write well. And, maybe, okay, I’d like someone else in the world to say “well done!” (again, I realize I wasn’t being entirely truthful before). But to write well, to do anything creative, really well, you have to devote the time to it. A LOT of time. You have to dedicate yourself to it. Commit TIME to it. Every day.

There’s more:  I also love to paint, to knit, to sew, to craft, to just make stuff! Be it with words or colors or cardboard or metal or marker or you name it.  I could spend every waking hour happily doing those things, every day, all day, and into the night. As long as there isn’t a deadline. Or someone looking over my shoulder. 

Then, of course, there are people and animals who depend on me to clean up after them, and feed them, and play with them, and chauffeur them, and supervise them, and teach them, and exercise them, and just BE with them….and the guilt comes back and stares me down.  

“What do you think you are doing spending hours in front of the computer? What do you think you are doing getting lost in knitting that project?  What do you think you are doing, sitting at that table playing with beads and wire for so long?”

And I’m back to madness. Mad at Time, mad at my past, mad at my surroundings, mostly mad at myself. Just generally mad.

Why am I blogging?

Why am I writing?

I don’t know. It must have something to do with being “Yappity”, as my father nicknamed me that one night. 

I will admit that when I was about, oh, twelve years old, I decided that I wanted to become a writer.  I was a total bookworm.  I was a complete story junkie.  I even wrote a poem around that age about books that expressed how I felt about the world of literature.  I would spend hours playing with my Fisher-Price toys making up all sorts of scenarios.  This family in the yellow dollhouse had a feud with the family that lived above the barber shop in the village.  This boy in the schoolhouse had a crush on the girl who lived in the chalet. Yeah. I had that many Fisher-Price toys. And I played with them until I was eleven. At which time, my friend’s older sister started making fun of me for it, and I reluctantly packed them all away.

I was an introvert.  Very much so.  I am an only child.  I used to think that this particular circumstance factored into my avoidance of social life, but now that I’ve had two children of my own, both of whom detest any sort of attention whatsoever, I see that it may simply be a genetic tendency. My husband, too, is an introverted person. Double whammy for my offspring.

Wait. A “yappity” introvert? 

Um. Yeah.

I might have been a bit of an introvert (my mother, an extrovert, was constantly trying to get me to be more “social”; pushing me to play with other kids in our apartment complex; pushing me to get out of my room, out of my books, out of my “selfish” playing alone with my toys.  I think she now regrets it; now that she knows those kids were most definitely NOT good influences…) but, still, I wanted to be able to express myself somehow. I wanted to write. I wanted to be an artist.  It was the perfect solution.

So, I had this idea in my head from a pretty early age that I was going to write. I was going to write about all sorts of things – because I also had an innate sense of justice/injustice that I wanted to address. I didn’t have the confidence to vocalize it to those around me, so putting it in writing seemed the way to go.

Becoming A Writer became my secret identity.  (Is it any wonder that “Harriet the Spy” was one of my favorite childhood books?) I began keeping journals (which are no longer in existence; a subject for a different post).  But somewhere in Junior High, that hope, that dream, of being a writer, and the confidence that I would someday achieve it, started to crack apart.

Ms. Baker. Yep. I am going to use her real name. Ms. Baker and her red marker and her red question mark next to the A that she – oh so reluctantly! – gave me on a story I was formulating in the writing journal that she assigned us to create.

She questioned the authenticity of the story I was writing.  “Original??” she wrote in the column – next to the “A”.  I was called in to talk to her after class. A humiliating, confusing, interrogation.  And that interrogation stayed with me, followed me, haunted me, the rest of my life.  It made me question my ability to be original, to have an original idea, to be able to write well enough, to be good enough, to be “true” enough….

It was the beginning to the end of my ambition.

It was also an unfortunate coincidence that I had the makings in my brain chemistry at that time for the development of Depression. Clinical Depression.

Yeah. Couple that with puberty and what do you get?

A hot mess.