Blogging: Oh how I miss you

I miss the sense of community, of being part of a greater whole.

I miss following link after link in middle of the night and discovering new worlds, new people, new perspectives, new ways of looking at things, things I have never even thought about.

I miss the rush, the excitement, the newness of it all. I miss being a virgin blogger.

After years of blogging away, I feel sullied.

It has become routine, to the point that I have scheduled posts in advance instead of writing spontaneously.

I have gone weeks without blogging, and felt not a twinge.

It is as if the reservoirs of my mind have dried up and disappeared, and while I grieve for the good ole days, it seems that the end may be near.

And that makes me sad.

Every time I try to recapture it I realize those days are dead and gone, and can never be had again.

I sat in class and froze when my teacher recited a familiar email address. It belonged to the guy sitting two seats away, and I recognized it as that of a former blogger.

My heart pounding, I wondered if I should introduce myself, say hey you, it's me, you may have read my blog, I may have read yours.

But after a quick search I saw that he hadn't blogged in 4 years.

Would that invade his privacy? Would he find it weird, or detached, so far in his past that he couldn't care less?

The more I thought about it the less I felt like asking him.

There was no need to ask him, I knew. I've met bloggers before, they come and go. I always thought I was different.

I'm not like them, thought I, not here merely to share the events of my day/week/life/bad dating stories. I'm a writer, and I will make something of myself someday.

One day a man called me 'unpractical' for majoring in English. He expressed his surprise that I hadn't read all the classics, that I couldn't name all the famous authors, that I wasn't like all other writers, weird and hip and high on crack.

Who am I, then?

Not a writer, not a blogger, not an academic.

Ah, the question I've been asking myself for quite some time.

As Mike-from-last-semester told me all about the novel he is writing, and I nodded my head and oohed and aahed to be polite, inside I was wondering if I could ever speak with that much confidence about anything I had written.

I wondered if the story I began, the one that I never finished, the one that, although it garnered positive feedback from my 'writerly friends' now sits in a dark box on my windowsill, will ever see the light of day again.

Oh, but the effort to force myself to sit down, the mental energy it takes to crank out a story, it hurts. It doesn't come naturally.

I do wonder about the effects of opium, the drug of choice for the Romantic writers.

Oh to be free of my own constricting mind, to be free of self-censorship, to be free of self-consciousness, to be free- to be free.

Ah, but my eyes grow tired and weary, my hands grow weak, and my words stutter and die.

Someday, my love. Someday.

Please, do take the time to check out this fresh new blog, a young friend of mine who is beginning her journey into the wonderful world of writing.

Update: my friend moved her blog to http://talkjewishtome.blogspot.com/, much easier format than tumblr.