When you write for a living, a weird thing can happen to your written voice. It becomes so malleable, smooshed into a house style to fit and be accepted that when you sit down to write for yourself, on your own terms, about whatever the hell you want to, the voice can take a while to get itself out. There’s a stutter, a whimper, a whisper. It’s so unsure of itself. What does it stand for? What is it trying to say? What’s the most natural way to say it?
Well, I’m not sure if that happens to all writers but it happens to me. Regularly. So regularly infact that there are large chunks of time represented as blanks in this blog’s more than three year history. Blanks where I am sitting somewhere stressing out about my blog’s direction, my inability to do justice to the ideas in my head and then the subsequent avoidance. There have been times that I have felt my voice ring out loud and clear on these pages as I share something close and dear to me or something personal and frightening. And just as I do, as I open up and let my readers get a real feel for me, I freak myself out and bolt that voice away lest it get too loud and lead me closer to where I actually want to be. It’s an act of self-sabotage of that I’m sure.
I’m not writing this from a place of revelation, I am still a little unsure of what I’m doing here. But I know I want to be here all the same. And for me, that’s good enough. Sometimes, I feel like I have to have something really big to say to write here, but the big things tend to scare the voice away. The voice doesn’t feel like it can do the big things justice somedays, or that others can say these things better than it can. So maybe I’ll stick to the little things again for awhile, to see if I can tease it out from it’s word cave. And at the moment, it’s the little things that are giving me the most joy. Little steps on wooden floors, little face kisses and an arm casually slung around my shoulder and little heart leaps from a place of numbness. The little things are the things of real life, of little chats with people in my neighbourhood, of laughs with friends, of making loud noises during fireworks, nailing a yoga pose that a few weeks ago sent me toppling and of that morning coffee feeling as it warms my hand.
And if that is all, then that is all.
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