Once upon a time, I used to keep paper journals where I wrote down everything I saw and thought. I spent long afternoons in pubs and cafes across Europe and Africa, nursing rationed cups of tea and writing down the minutiae of my twenty year old life. I have a box full of those journals stored unceremoniously in a cardboard box up in my parents’ crawl space.
I haven’t even looked at them in over a decade. I kind of cringe at the thought. Judging by the quality of the writing in my high school notebooks found this past summer when I was back home cleaning out my old room, some things are better left unread. I’ve toned down the hyperbole over the years. I think. I hope.
Those journals recorded all the ways in which my hopeful heart was broken (so many ways, my god!), the endless nature of overnight bus rides and the long slog to find affordable accommodation (dorm beds, sofas, floors, benches), the tedium of pretty much living off bread and cheese for weeks on end, the chronic bronchial infections from living in damp, crappy hostels, the minutiae of daily life, down to the last cup of tea and the doings of people whose names I have long since forgotten.
When I moved to Turkey in 2002, I started sending out mass emails detailing my new life in Central Anatolia- the staring, the mustaches, the evil eye, the stinky pastirma and sucuk, the Selcuk tombs found in empty car parks and in the middle of a traffic roundabout, the enormous bottles of strong, soapy cologne. These missives attempted to be funny (and maybe they were).
I omitted the heartbreak and tedium, as those weren’t interesting to people in my address book. Being nearly married off to the brother of a woman we met on the Ankara metro was.
The mass emails eventually mutated into my LiveJournal prototype blog, which had maybe 5 readers. Between 2004 and 2010, I shifted back to my old journaling tendencies and started writing down everything around me. Minutiae reigned. I updated it daily. There was often no subject line and no focus, no point, no tidy conclusion. Lots of descriptors. Lots of meandering sentences.
Looking back now, I’m happy to have a record of my Turkish daily life- it seems so far away now, as if it belonged to a whole other person.
The Livejournal writing faded away when I started up this site for my MatadorU course. I started to have topics: alleys of Shanghai, slow travel, learning Mandarin, doomed street chickens, genocidal tourism. My writing became more focused; the hyperbole and personal minutiae fell by the wayside. If I showed any emotion or gave away any personal information, it was tightly controlled and had a point to it.
This past September, when my semi-unemployment was confirmed, I had grand plans to write more. I was going to expand this blog, make it bigger, better, more. I was going to update it several times a week. I was going to write a book. I was going to be a writer.
That kind of didn’t happen.
I stopped writing, in fact. You may have noticed the dearth of updates. Once every few weeks, at best. Most of my writing has been over at Wok With Me, Baby, and that’s because it’s just so much easier to talk about chicken soup and cookies than it is to come up with an endless stream of thoughtful, concise, witty, well-controlled pieces on intelligent topics pertaining (even tangentially) to living in Shanghai. Mostly I just feel like I have absolutely nothing I have to say. Or want to say. Nothing I want to say out loud. Nothing I feel a need to share. Nothing I feel able to share.
Which is a problem, really.
This site lies fallow for weeks on end while I busy myself in my head with a bazillion incoherent thoughts. My Facebook page gets inundated with random photos of mops and bunnies and pithy captions while my actual writing falls by the wayside. It’s rather embarrassing.
I’m trying to figure out what to do with this site. I don’t want it to fade away, shedding readers and interest until it finds its way into the forgotten blog graveyard.
I’m also trying to figure out why my brain refuses to want to write this year, now that I have the free time. I couldn’t even complete my Nanowrimo this time. I just stopped. I had nothing to say. Where did my words go? Where did I go? What happened?
Sometimes I think this year wasn’t meant to be my year of writing, that this chunk of relatively free time was meant to be a silent retreat instead. I’ve been writing non-stop about everything, all the time, for decades now. Maybe I’m supposed to take this time to go back to bed with a cup of tea and say absolutely nothing about anything. It’s hard to say.
Any thoughts? Suggestions? Scoldings?
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