Beginning Again: Rocking the World One Word at a Time

So I began this blog last semester for two reasons: I always wanted to be cool enough to blog, and it was a requirement for a course I was taking. We sort of had the freedom to write what we wanted, although I use the term “freedom” loosely because we still had to keep whatever we were saying relevant to the course. Thus some of my blog posts are less than exciting (super boring) and actually I would rather have played the how-fast-can-you-jab-the-knife-between-your-fingers-on-the-table-without-chopping-off-a-digit game and lost than slapping dull interview transcriptions onto the space that some call “artistic online domains.” I have found that, for me, writing to write is the dumps. It does nothing to advance my right-brained ramblings. But I think I might prefer the writing to write method over the writing some words down because someone says you are a certain level of “good”—whatever that qualifies—when you do method.

My primary resolution is to just write. I want to write because I love it. I want to write because I have something to say. It doesn’t matter how many times I do it and it doesn’t matter if someone thinks I suck at it and it doesn’t matter if what I have to say doesn’t matter. I want to write for myself and not think about how my writing will impact other people all the time. I do that enough for school. But I also don’t want to write just because I have a quota or an alternate agenda to fulfill; as far as “free-writing” goes, I only want to write when I have something to say. Something real.

One time, I wrote a personal essay about a bike and my childhood and what that bike represented. The piece featured words and phrases like “maturity,” “growth,” “upward success,” “trials and tribulations,” and “bumps in the road.” You don’t even have to read that essay to know it was a piece of shit. Seriously? Bumps in the road? I felt like I was writing something that might be so boring and cliché and ridiculous that my reader would weep terribly and say something like, “I’ve never been actually bored to tears. Alas.”

My secondary resolution then is to begin again. The humdrum, lifeless, learning-to-ride-my-bike-taught-me-how-to-overcome-obstacles anecdote is the scum of the earth. (Not always but, for all intents and purposes, I will treat it as such in this particular right-brained rambling.) I want to revitalize my writing. We’re all told to write outside of the box but the truth is there are lots of stellar, creative ways to write inside the box. I lost my passion for a while, because I clichéd the pen right out of my hand as the words came flying out of my ass onto the page. Everyone is just too busy thinking about how to connect life and bicycles (lifecycles?) when the really real thing is the thing that’s real and all you have to do is write about it.

Writing and revitalizing. Revitalizing my writing. Writing my revitalization. Whichever, whatever, in 2016, I am rewriting my vitality to write.