Just Write Something

I spend some portion of every day thinking, what can I post about?  Not because I think I have readers who are clamoring for my thoughts on spinsterhood or whatever, but because it makes me happy and clears my head and sometimes, I sit down to write about struggling with something and wind up writing down the solution before I even know I know it.  My brain works like a book; I narrate my own story to myself constantly.  My memories look like novel pages in my head.  (Really? she said incredulously. That sounded like the kind of thing people say in books, but not in real life.) When weighing decisions, I think, which of these options would I prefer to read about?  Were I graced with less self-consciousness, I’d be one of those people always scribbling in a notebook, scraps of poems I know and poems I’d write, song lyrics, grand ideas for novels that seem juvenile and awful when I read them two days later.  But my god, how pretentious; what, does she think she’s like a writer or something?  Nice journal, hippie.

I don’t want to read about what I’m thinking lately, amorphous grey worries that skitter away when I try to grab them, like clouds in the sky during a cold March that won’t end.  So I dither and dabble and try to think of something funny to write to break through this block, but sometimes I don’t feel funny.  Not that I feel devastatingly depressed or anything, just kind of…meh.  My boss quit a few weeks ago, so work is really stressful, and the weekly drive to Philadelphia is wearing me down.  I need a lot of time– A LOT–to stare off into space and think my thoughts and zone out.  I’m a classic introvert; without time to reflect–time I can really relax, with nothing hanging over my head like work emails or homework or social obligations–I start to wither.  I’ve been so busy, I reason, that’s why my writing mojo has left me.

Searching for inspiration, I read through some of my old posts last weekend (narcissist alert!)  Some of them, I think, are pretty good.  A friend quoted a really old one to me recently–but then I thought of that thing you said about making an emotionally unavailable man your boyfriend and then being stuck with an emotionally unavailable boyfriend–and I thought, oh yeah, that one was pretty decent.  I made a good point there.

I just don’t feel that wise lately.  My birthday is in a couple weeks (ah, here comes the heart of this post) and the idea of celebrating it just leaves me cold.  I don’t really want to have a happy hour, or a big group dinner.  I don’t want to go dancing, or force my friends to (listen to me) karaoke like I usually do.  I buy myself whatever I want, I’ve been to some sort of theatrical production three weekends in a row, I just saw my family, I just went to New York, I prefer the cheap pedicure place by my house and my Kindle to a spa day with my girlfriends.  There’s nothing I want that anyone can give me.

I want…a do-over.  I want to not be turning 36 as a single, childless woman working a job that is ridiculously hard when it should be easy, pursuing her stupid undergraduate degree and in love with the most ambivalent man on the planet.  I don’t want to blog about that whole situation any more; I’m so tired of hearing myself talk about it that I can’t imagine how tired other people are of hearing about it.  I want to go back in time and un-want the things that brought me here, so that I might be somewhere else, like in a house with a man who loves me and a couple of rosy-cheeked little kids with high, piping voices who drive me to distraction now but will drive me to the doctor when I’m old.  And I want to not be the kind of ingrate who dares to look askance at my very good life that I worked so very hard to make for myself.

It’s okay.  This is not a major life crisis, just a bit of a blue period.  Maybe admitting it will make it go away.  Or at least let me write about something else.