Why Blogging is Difficult

I haven't been blogging lately as I've intended to, not because I have nothing to write about, because that's never true. My mind is always going; I observe and think and feel things at an exhausting pace. I constantly compose things in my head, plan paintings, start projects. It's never a case of what is there to do, but what do I do first. I don't understand people who lack ideas, people who get bored, people who find it easy to sit still. I don't really even understand people who watch television.

The reason I don't blog more often is that so many of my thoughts are simply difficult to share. They're too personal, sometimes. Too complex, often. And so much of the time, especially lately, my thoughts involve other people: other people's struggles, or their failings, the things they do to annoy me or to encourage me, the things they say that embarrass me. Private as I tend to be, it's hardest of all for me to write about other people.

The reasons I censor myself are so varied and subtle that I can't even explore them here. Not now. But they come from a lifetime of being molded, rewarded or punished, for the things I say. We all experience that to a certain level, the pressure to express ourselves differently than our wont, but I have always felt it keenly. I realize that my writing is stronger, often, and certainly more interesting when I edit myself less but, barring an occasional slip of the tongue when tired or in an ill temper, I simply don't know how. In fact, I often think through what I'm going to say so many times before speaking that I leave things out, having forgotten what I haven't said.

For the most part, I'm not ashamed or embarrassed by anything I think, yet I'm still private. I try to accept my foibles and flaws as graciously as I do those of others. But I'm choosy about what I share with whom, because even kind and accepting people don't always understand. Writing my thoughts in a blog is counterintuitive. Anyone could read it, anyone could misunderstand, anyone could write hateful comments with bad grammar and repost on Twitter. Most often, I don't care about these things, because people are so often unreasonable. But sometimes I do.

The fact that my brain works the way it does--thinking many thoughts at once, following many paths back and forth--makes it hard to express thoughts in short blog posts. Imagine a spiderweb, where each thought has tendrils of thought leading out from it, and each tendril is connected to other tendrils in a spiral pattern. Imagine being aware of all these thoughts simultaneously, to how they interact and form connections, how they're active and alive, expanding and retracing their pathways, and forming new connections. Imagine experiencing this web in various ways: colors fading into other colors, each string having a different melody, a different tensile strength, a different smell, a different speed of movement. Now, imagine a mind filled with a hundred of these webs, each different, each sharing similarities, and each breathing like a living organism.

Imagine experiencing this every moment of your waking life.

Imagine, too, a memory that causes things from twenty years ago to be as fresh as yesterday. Imagine remembering, word for word, that thing your American history professor said in class on April 1, 1993, when he was talking about the Muckrakers, when your hair was wet and you were wearing that blue sweatshirt inside out. Imagine remembering the exact quality of sun on the morning you heard on the radio that a man had escaped from prison, when you were four, when your mother was planting zinnias in the flowerbed behind the house, and how you made your own raisins by laying them on an old board on top of the roof, and how you ate grapefruit for breakfast loaded with so much sugar it barely tasted like grapefruit, and how your hands were sticky and you wiped them on your yellow terry cloth shorts.

These last few weeks, I've thought a lot about people in my life: friends who've lost their parents, whose marriages and relationships have ended, who've entered new relationships which haven't met their expectations, who have health problems and struggles with old traumas and old demons. I reflect on these things, I think of blogging about them, but I don't. I listen, I help as I can, I offer my support, but ultimately, I don't feel comfortable talking about them.

It's going to take me time, but I'm eventually going to write about the more difficult things. There are things I believe people should hear, though I'm reluctant to be the person to say them, and there are things I believe I should say, if only to say them. All of it is counterintuitive; some of it is downright scary. But it's something I'm going to do.