Perhaps one thing that never gets shared in the aspirational and pefectional universe of social media is that staring at a blank screen is hard. Returning to something like writing when you’ve been away for a while is hard. It might even be doubly so when the world is full of juicy topics of the moment and major shifts in thought that one could jump on an give a take.
Kayla Scanlon gave a good take on this in an recent blog:
Some people think the shift is progress. Others see collapse. Either way, the line between digital and physical life is increasingly blurry. What happens online is real life. What we consume is what we become.
“When something happens that people are talking about, say nothing.” at least that’s what I try to tell myself. All things need a measure of time to understand and absorb and the default mode should be processing.
Some of why I’ve left for a bit has to do with a child. Creating and taking care of a new human, our first, turns out to be a full-time job. All the other full-time jobs you had before now have to wait to this little person stays fed and engaged. naturally, this was always going to be a temporary stop as our baby grew, but I had considerable time to reflect on this while walking in circles trying to coax this cute, scrunchy human to sleep.
I’m still learning, of course. There are a ton of things ‘to do’ right now and the blazing headache I have annoys me to no end, but I’m compelled to return to my writing. If not for a brief moment until my life regulates a little more and I can get some brain space for other stuff.
But, how do you return to writing when you’ve been away? Like Nike and Shia LaBeouf have said, just do it.
