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Prior to starting this blog, compliments on my writing ability came primarily from my mother and the few people with whom she had shared things I’ve written. I always figured that she was just being a good mom when telling me how much she appreciated the things I had written. After starting this blog I have come to realize that there are others, who are not my mom, that also appreciate my writing. Of course it makes me feel good that people would take the time to acknowledge something I created, but at the same time it is also embarrassing because I don’t quite know how to respond to that besides saying, “Thank you.” Sometimes the mention of how well I write brings about a discussion of why I am not writing professionally. This conversation makes me uncomfortable for a number of reasons; firstly I do not believe it is on par with professional writing, additionally it is difficult to relate that I write for pleasure and worry that taking it professional would ruin that aspect, and finally I do not know what to write about usually, the things I write sort of just pop into my head.
I enjoy writing. I am not particularly creative, I cannot craft or paint or make things from scratch. What I am good at is thinking and what happens with my writing is that I get stuck on a thought and I start writing about it. A lot of the time I end up with a jumbled mess of thoughts and that is as far as it goes. Sometimes I am able to work out the flow and organize the thoughts in a way that seems more natural and those are the pieces that people actually get to read. There are other times where I feel like I want to write, having nothing to write about and the result looks an awful lot like this post 🙂
Writing down thoughts does a few things for me. Most important is that I get it out of my head so that I can ‘forget’ about it. The act of writing is a stress reliever for me, it gets my mind off of whatever I happen to be obsessing over and lets me escape for a while. This would be similar to why people read, but reading is only successful at putting me to sleep, so I write instead. Writing allows me to express emotions, even if no one is going to read what I have written I still get to release whatever emotions are bottled up.
There is yet another aspect to writing that I find helpful. I am not the greatest of speakers. I know that I have issues verbalizing my thoughts and I have no clue how to correct them, so writing allows me to do what I cannot do verbally. I actually had an employee review several years ago from a boss who told me that I speak too slowly and in too much detail. I am much like my father in that respect. He too spoke slowly. Perhaps for him, like me, the speed at which we talked had to do with how we were thinking about each thing we were saying. An interesting tidbit about me, when I was a child, I would silently repeat back everything I said. My lips would move so you could see that I was doing it, but it was silent. I have no idea why I did that or why I stopped doing that. Perhaps I stopped because people would notice and comment about it. In any case, I have never felt confident in speaking. That isn’t to say I haven’t engaged in public speaking. I taught classes in the early to mid-90’s on how to use the internet and quite enjoyed the experience. Not because I was speaking but because I was instructing/teaching. Writing allows me to relay whatever message I want to pass along in a way that doesn’t trigger the insecurities of speaking. Selfishly, writing allows me to say what I want without being interrupted as well.
Often times my actual writings get to a point where I feel like they have gone astray and no longer represent the thoughts in my head. This paragraph for instance is one of those examples. I have written it twice now because I was not sure what to say next in a way that made sense and followed some sort of natural flow. So I switched gears and put in something that is pretty irrelevant and probably obvious. I suppose there was no need for anything beyond the previous paragraph, but it felt incomplete for some reason.