I have been keeping my writing fingers silent for a while, in many aspects of my life. I think a lot of it has to do with fear--fear of saying stupid things, fear of saying unfunny things, fear of the fact that whatever I put out there is what could be thrown back into my face to harm me in some way. There's risks involved with putting yourself out there, with taking a chance that people will like what you write and want more, which you may or may not deliver again. I have always been the type of person that fiddles with the font, the size, the title, the opening sentence far more than is necessary to start writing things down and making sense of them. I used to write in notebooks, and there are hundreds of pages of me writing one word on the page and then starting another because that one word was WRONG. Even if the same exact word started the sentence on the next page, it was still a fresh page, a fresh start at my masterpiece, a different feel for the word The.

I am trying to work out in my head why I haven't gotten a writing career off the ground, why I haven't consistantly written in this blog, or even a journal or diary ever. I have started on a teleplay, well a huge character list and a list of various plots, but have yet to get them into any sort of format that would eventually appear on a tv near you. I want to write various things, simple enough but they just haven't gotten from my head to the page, even though I can clearly see what I'd like for them to show up as. I talk to myself sometimes, or rather the imaginary audience that I see in my head accepting my Oscar for best screenplay. And yet the plots and words stay stuck in the birdnest that is my brain.

I worry that I will never write them, that I will always be distracted by the kids, the tv, depression, thoughts of previous depressions, thoughts of future depressions, worries about income, worries about our kids and their lives, worries about millions of things of which I cannot control but have to accept or plan for or protect myself against. Part of me is very okay with that, since I am my biggest critic. Part of me is scared that I will never try for it, that I will allow myself to think that only young 20-something's get their words out there and make a difference in the world, which seems to be an overall theme in my head. When I was a kid, I honestly and naively thought that people stopped having kids when my parents did. It was weird to see babies born in the 80's for me. What I was surrounded by is what reality was. It wasn't until I was older that I realized that in a lot of ways, my reality was heavily stunted by my mother's reality of being bipolar, dissociative disorder, just plain cukoo for Cocoa Puffs most of the time. I still have a hard time thinking that there is an amazing life ahead of me--I got another notion in my head that you got out of high school, went to college, got out of college, and immediately did something with your life and that was it. There was no changing paths later--you knew out of college and stayed there doing it for the rest of your life. That is not how things worked out for me, but because of that preconceived notion, it has been hard for me to accept that there is more than failure out there in the different paths I have meandered around while I fooled myself that I would finish college in the midst of it all. If that ever happens, that would be cool, but the path I took got me my kids and what I have now, and I don't want to discount that by saying it would be better with a college education, since who knows if any of it would happen if my path veered from what has actually happened.

These ramblings are actually taking me somewhere positive, although it's probably not more than slightly more interesting than a box of bran flakes on the kitchen table to those reading it. I think it's not just me who wonders what the heck my purpose in life is other than to clean poop off kid's butts and play Santa. But even as I am in good company with those who wonder why they were put here, I am at the same time equally wanting to separate myself from them by doing something above and beyond the normal everyday stuff and wanting to just be so good at the normal everyday stuff that I fit right in with everyone. Therein lies part of the problem; the other part is to actually do what I want to and attempt to accomplish something, even it's collecting rejection slips. And there is where I have the most difficulty--the doing. It's so much easier to read someone else's work on the internet, in a magazine, in a book, than to generate the energy and focus necessary to complete something that came entirely from my own head and hands. And that's what this post is all about--it may be shit, but it's out there, and if it can be out there, there is the possibility that my other works of shit, I mean writing, can also get out there. Step 1 accomplished. Steps 2-infinity to go.