taking the plunge

About two years ago perhaps more, I took a workshop on creative non-fiction - memoir style writing. I loved it. I had always loved writing - well until I had to write a dissertation and used it to torture myself for four years. Writing became a chore. I have always been an editor in process, endlessly going over and rewriting before I had finished my thoughts - in fact I just did it now. So over time, any writing, not just for the work, became tedious. I was always thinking about the audience rather than about expressing myself first. Journal writing, poetry, whatever it was I would have to spend hours psyching myself up to sit down with the computer or pen and paper. This course helped me get passed that, to some extent anyway.

I've dreamed in past about writing for an audience wider than the few academics from my field who read the paltry few articles I ever had published. I thought the course would give me a means to getting out some of my writing, sharing some of my stories. But the perfectionist in me, the woman who loves well crafted prose and beautiful phrasing, wanted it to be right the first time around without the need for the painful process of editing and revising. Ironic really, given all the self-editing I have done in so many areas of my life.

Enter the blog option. First put into my head simultaneously by my workshop instructor and a dear friend. It's taken nearly two years since then but here I finally am. I don't really know what this blog will wind up being. A collection of writing and stories from my past and my present. An online journal I share with strangers and perhaps some friends? But since starting the process of trying to get pregnant as a single woman, I've had things I need to express and writing is the means of expression with the lowest threshold for me right now.

I turned 40 nearly two months ago and at the time many of my younger friends asked me - how does it feel? In some sense that is a silly question - a change in a number doesn't really make a different. Except it did. At first, when I realized that my body's clock wasn't cooperating to give me the one thing I wanted for my birthday - to be pregnant - I felt all the things they tell us we should/will feel at turning 40 - women anyway. But once I got passed the initial feelings of loss - loss of having spent so much of my life single, loss at waiting so long to begin the process of trying to become a parent through giving birth, etc., I realized that what I felt was comfort and ease. A sense of being present and a calmness that I've only felt in snatches at earlier points in my life. I have come, over the subsequent two months, to realize that the possibilities for me are still endless. That transformation is only a commitment to myself to pursue the things I have always wanted but never allowed myself to really go after. Hence the subtitle - taking the long way round - adapted from the Dixie Chicks song. I really have been taking the long way, but finally at 40 I can see how many advantages that has. And I can allow myself to commit to the journey that is mine - and enjoy the scenic route since that is where I am anyway.