What if I Was a Writer Again?

What if I just said, “okay, brain. okay, muse. We’re ON again,” and started writing?

There are moments, like the string of them I’m in right now, where I feel that part of me so tangibly. Like wavy lines of strewn together words are swirling in my heart and rolling down my arms into my fingers. Keyboard becomes musical instrument. The flow engages.

But I write one paragraph and stall.

I haven’t been able to find my voice for so long. My writer’s voice. I have a social media (mostly Facebook) voice, but that one stays mostly quiet. Something about sharing started feeling hollow and sad -- and more than a little complicated -- about 6 months into the pandam.

I have my teacher’s voice. So much time in the last two and a half years explaining concepts and letting myself channel inner wisdom, brainiacity, merging new thoughts and old. Refining my voice as an educator, elder, mentor... while very much retaining the heart of what makes me a great practitioner: I am. So. Real. Approachable. Myself.

I have a podcaster’s voice. At least a My Podcast-ers voice. Thing being, that shit is almost always scripted. I’ll just free riff sometimes, but for the most part, each episode is 15 or so pages of text. Stream of consciousness writing given some level of structure. But not much!

So the writing has, at least in part, taken on the cadence and flow of my actual, out loud voice. It has become a mirror of how I speak. That cadence doesn’t always translate to written sentences well. I know some folks have a hard time, can’t find the flow and rhythm, and get lost in my commas and parentheses and ellipses...

I think it has also just been a difficult time to be a writer. En generalmente. Especially of the more visionary type. Which... is not me referring to myself as a visionary (although I am? Maybe?) so much as acknowledging that when you have the ability to see, understand and observe massive systems -- the societal kinds, the psychological kinds, the community kinds -- while also having some sense of their ever-evolving trajectories of breakdown, collapse and restructuring... at the same time as you are living through the processes and wrangling your own inner world and reactions and responses...

Well, how do you write about that?

Others have figured it out. For me, I have needed to reclaim the privacy of my interior world.

I suppose that part of it has also been that so much of my writing experience has been very personal narrative-y. I started blogging when I was frickin’ 16 or 17 years old. I kept an online journal for the better part of a decade, and then intermittently for another decade.

Even my professional writing ended up being personal narrative style. My mentors in the elder generations gasped. How unprofessional to share yourself in that manner!

But... stories illustrate themes so much better than anything else. And I knew that the people I was impacting -- who saw themselves or made connections through hearing about my own journeys with astrology and spirituality -- were my audience. And I was so deep in the throes of being cracked open as a healer that two years of weekly column writing demanded that I process what was happening in that kind of forum.

And I loved it.

There is something to be said for keeping things closer to the vest in the last few years. Not that I’ve been keeping it in entirely, mind you. My personal processing has still been largely written -- it is just received by close confidants via messenger and text rather than “the public”. It is processed and let go of in therapy. I process at my altar. With my guides. Through ebbs and flows of numb depression and then fluid surge.

But I identify as a writer. I have always believed that in my heart, that is What I Am.

When my progressed Mercury stationed direct in the late summer of 2019, I was like... here we go! NOW I’m gonna write that book!

But instead? Silence. Empty sentences. Dead ends.

The shift has felt so bizarre. And yet... why push to change things that just don’t want to be changed?

Although believe me. I have tried to push it. But part of my deepening practice in this life has to do with observing ways I’ve learned to force my energy to be what is not -- and then cutting that the fuck out. I increasingly recognize that acceptance is part of my personal maturation process.

Maybe just telling my brain and muse that we’re back to it again is actually going to work?

she typed that, and then a hummingbird came right up to her head and started chirping at her for about 15 seconds

seems legit