Just keep writing

For a moment I got sucked into the vortex of blog stats. How many people are reading this? How many visitors did I have last month? This year? Look at how many more I had last year. Gosh. Why did I even look at these stats? Why do I care? How can people read what I’m not writing? Write for yourself whispers my soul.

I’m not going to lie. It isn’t easy to stick to writing, especially when the inspiration isn’t there. I see how much I wrote last year, particularly February when I committed to blogging every day for that month. I had stats! I had likes and follows. I’m not going to lie. It felt easy and good. This year I’ve been adrift and honestly (why do I think I have to keep prefacing myself about honesty!) when I lost my job, I lost my mojo, even though it had been steadily seeping away for some time.

When I was culling through old magazines yesterday, I discovered a quiz in one of my old Oprah magazines that posed the question: What problem has you stuck right now? And I simply answered work. This was 2 years before I finally no longer had the job that had me stuck. I spent so much time rolling it around in my head (and heart). How can I be happier at work? How can I make it better or be at peace with it? Can I just simply have a job that I go to and not care? Go through the motions of work and come home and start my life at 5:00? At least I don’t have to wonder about that anymore!

But while I had the misery of work, I also had a passion to write. I wrote most days, even if it was only in my journal and never saw the light of day. It’s a muscle I let go to atrophy until I didn’t know whether I cared any longer about writing. I didn’t care about putting words together. Playing, moving them around the page until what was in my heart was in front of my eyes. I’m flexing that muscle again and even though it is weak, I feel that at least it’s not dead.

MC