I used to write expansively. I wrote in grammar school, shaky notes in a green diary with a lock and key. In high school, I took to writing poetry on the walls in my generously-sized walk in closet, behind the hanging clothes, in fine tipped marker and sometimes colored pencil. In college I discovered typing made the ideas flow more quickly and spent hours hunkered over a mystical Brother Word Processor that seemed at the time like an alien’s typewriter with magical and maddening temperamental powers. The computer lab was occasionally used as well, but that seemed less safe, like showering at the gym. I went through a post-college writing phase where a threw away every paper I wrote on nearly immediately after completion. Not for any reasons of insecurity or shame, mostly because it felt dramatic and like I was finding that perfect zen-state of writing that was truly only for personal satisfaction.

Once I had my first child, though, my husband bought me a blog. He purchased a popular URL and hired a designer and set up a beautiful place for me to write and express and indulge in my experiences as a new mom. (Yes, I was one of the original “mommy bloggers.”) But after about 5 years, I started to feel trapped in the subject matter, boxed in, and what’s worse, as Facebook was gaining popularity, my blog started to leak out into the wider neighborhood of people I actually knew. Suddenly my anonymous audience was running into me at church and the mall and commenting on that day’s post right to my face. That was just too much. And once mother and mother-in-law and other relatives began making suggestions on things perhaps I might want to *not* write about (or write in a nicer way about), I couldn’t do it anymore. I hung it up. All the good got snowballed into all the bad and I got a pissed-off case of writers block that lasted 7 years.

The funny thing about the writers block was that I missed writing so much it ate at me. I would run in the early morning, full of words and phrases and then say, “Damn, girl, you’ve got to write that down!!” But I didn’t because I wasn’t sure where to write it down anymore. I didn’t want to start another blog, I didn’t want to just have piles of paper in the trash and I didn’t want to leave random scraps of word documents on my desktop file. And I just didn’t have the heart.

It wasn’t completely squelched, it turns out: I found my that part of where my heart meets my head again last weekend. I had the honor, joy and thrill of participating in Lauren Fleshman and Maryanne Eliott’s WILDER Retreat. And I wrote again.

I wrote like a hungry kid who just broke into an ice cream parlor after hours, stabbing a spoon into every flavor, and gobbling so fast I could hardly taste.  It wasn’t until the 3rd day in that I was able to breathe while I wrote. Able to slow down the pen and think in between the purging of adjectives and verbs and missing punctuation.  Maryanne told us many times during those writing sessions that often what you write is going to be crap… but that you’ve got to get the crap out so that the better things can come. You have to write about the forbidden things, the boring things, the whiney things so that you can have the space to write about the real things.  And she is right.

I’m ready to write again. A lot of it is going to be boring, indulgent and random. Some might be funny or meaningful. Most of it will be true, but I’m a storyteller, so embellishments are going to come unwillingly and joyfully. I once saw a Twitter disclaimer that stated, “All tweets are my own thoughts. Duh.” And that’s what this is going to be, folks. My own thoughts, my own way of seeing things, my own way of telling me own story.