On writing ... or not writing
I never knew why but my mom really wanted me to be a writer. She may have had frustrated desires she was trying to realize through me or maybe she saw something worth encouraging (although I don't recall doing a whole lot of writing as a youngster).
She tried several times to get me interested in keeping a diary or journal. Her big selling point was, "You could be just like Laura Ingalls!"* I'm sure she thought that was the hook I needed to dive into writing. I did love the Little House on the Prairie books and really resonated with the character of young Laura.
*If you aren't familiar with Laura Ingalls Wilder, she wrote about life growing up on the prairie in the late 1800s and her manuscripts were written in pencil in notebooks.
More than once mom would present me with pencils and blank notebooks with the clear, very hopeful expectation that I would start writing. That made me feel so guilty because, while I wanted to please my parent, writing in a diary or daily journaling has never been my thing. And, being pressured to produce just made the disinclination turn into active avoidance.
I think if you're going to be anything like an artist, a musician or a writer you have to have some kind of innate drive to do it. I can see that in the musicians I've dated - they were always living their music. Playing every day, tapping out rhythms, writing down lyrics. Their craft was in them and always seeking an expressive outlet. They didn't have to force themselves to do it.
Mom had a fine arts degree but was a bookkeeper by trade. Still, she was an artist at heart and was always creating something. Little empty coffee creamer containers became trash cans or lampshades for the Barbie dolls, loose beads and endcaps were glued together to become miniature perfume bottles, a random rubber lizard was glamorized with metallic paint and pigment powder for no particular reason other than it was there and so was the desire to creatively express on anything that didn't run away quick enough.
I am not any of these things. The only thing I can readily pinpoint to passionately pursuing is procrastination. The more important it is to get something done, the harder and better I procrastinate! Even as an adult, I've tried keeping a journal and the effort always peters out after a few days or weeks.
And, while I can't force myself to become a writer, I'm kind of sad about this because I tend to live in my head so much. I'm quiet and introverted but there's a lot going on inside of me that I never talk about. And when I'm gone, how will people ever know what I thought and dreamed and desired?
My mom was also like that. She was quiet and introverted and I'm pretty sure there was a lot going on in her head, too, that no one ever knew about. And, despite her desire for me to keep a diary, she never did the same. Even though I was in my early 30s when she passed away, I never felt like I knew her as a person, separate from being my mother. And now I can't ever find out because what was kept inside is now gone.
I think about these things and then I think about my own son and what he might want to know that I keep inside of me. Even though we have deeper conversations than my mother and I ever had, there's still a lot going on in my head that I don't speak about. I've told him that when I'm writing my blog posts (the closest I've ever come to consistently writing anything) I'm writing to him and my hope is that maybe he gets a look at what's going on inside.
That was the intention, anyway, but in reality I do a fair bit of self-censoring both because I don't want to let it all hang out for the whole internet to see but also because I feel like my personal site has a tone and everything I'm thinking is not necessarily in alignment with that.
Maybe I'm overthinking things. Or underthinking things. Whichever way, I am definitely thinking things. Just not writing them down!
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