Writing here has been such an internal tug-of-war between ego and insecurity, responsibility and guilt. What I do know is that when I don’t write, I go to bed feeling like I’m missing something. I’ve made a habit feeling this way for the years that I haven’t been regularly writing in any form (besides writing emails, which is about as silly as counting podcasts as “reading”). It’s not that I got tired of writing, or discouraged. Actually, it’s my writing that started it all – that go me teaching, traveling, politically motivated, and the reason I know most of the people who have become central to my life. The reason I stopped writing is because the life that writing gifted me got filled with so much. So writing here has been a part of my process of returning to that which makes all else possible – my writing, my family, my soul.
Whenever we try to get back into something that we used to be great at, we’re sure to hear someone utter, “it’s like riding a bike!” It’s like riding a bike is as much of a cop-out as saying that anything that’s unfamiliar tastes like chicken. So for the record, frog doesn’t taste like chicken, and writing isn’t like riding a bike. The expression comes from the fact that, if you ever knew how to ride a bike before, then even after years of not riding, your muscle-memory will kick back into hear as soon as you hop on the seat and put your fingers on the handlebars. Maybe that’s true. But what they don’t tell you is that your bike-riding skills will be equal or less than what they were when you last rode a bike, which is probably in the third grade. And back then, riding anything was thrilling, because we were still a lifetime away from driving a car. In the third grade, we didn’t have anywhere to go, so we rode for leisure, and in our invincible bodies we popped wheelies and rode down stairways with such finesse that if someone asked if we were great at riding bikes we’d say “the best!”
The problem with looking at returning to writing like returning to biking is that, like biking, the writing doesn’t age well unattended. It’s not wine (to add another poorly-placed analogy). And while I’ve spent a fair share of my life formulating phrases and sentence structures in my head, there’s something about the birthing process of splaying them out for yourself and others to see that simply can’t happen internally. I could pull the same tricks out of my hat as I did back in college, but for that I’d have to ignore the fact that I’m no longer impressed by quickly-paced multi-syllabic rhymeschemes (and neither is the rest of the world). The emotions that were raw in me back then have either been consumed or expired. Writing like my 19-year-old self would feel as inappropriate as dressing like my 19-year-old self, and while one could argue that the problem lies in the fact that my young self wasn’t writing or dressing timelessly, I’d argue back that it’s that bold short-sightedness that made my work resonate with my peers and others back then.
So now I’m laying all this out, as my mid-thirties-self, feeling pretty cruddy about it all now, but also intrigued by what this will be to me when I return to it years later. The goal for now is simply to leave something for me to return to in the first place.