This is my brain....ON

Although this is the inaugural post, the beginning of this blog is actually the result of a culmination of events that have led me to want to incorporate some kind of public writing in my life.

When I was younger, I was the kind of girl who was always writing in some way. In a journal, poems, and for the student newspaper in college. For a long time, I wanted to be a writer, but once I graduated college, the idea that I had no other talent or skills quietly bothered me. I lacked ego, and instead wondered, "Who was I?" and "Who cared what I thought?". I was young, and humble enough to think that that fact alone was not enough to recommend me. I also did not want to be a part of what I saw as the burgeoning memoir genre, full of works by authors who seemed to have little to offer, except a naval-gazing story of their own life. The world, the people, and the issues that comprise it were always as interesting and important to me as my own life, and I just didn’t feel qualified to write, or to make commentary, without some other verifiable store of knowledge, some objective level of expertise that could be measured with a scale other than my own perception. So I set out to do more, and to know more than the contents of my own head.

That desire led me to a socially and intellectually conscious career, and ultimately to doctoral level study, where I am now. I am still not an expert in my field, but I can say with confidence that I have a solid base of knowledge in an area that is of the world, and beyond the space between my own ears.

What I didn’t bet on was that the process of learning, seeing and ultimately knowing would completely shut down the written word for me. For more than a decade, I wrote next to nothing professional, personal, or otherwise. There are literally gaps of years in the journal I kept from August 1996 to July 2008. But by not indulging in the process of writing, I have realized that I was also living partially obscured from myself, because the mirror of the written word was missing.

Writing has always been the way I make sense of the world. For me it is truth serum, and the way I know my own heart. And although it was necessary to take the time to do all that evidence gathering in my study of life and subjects within, I have found that the time has come for me to stop researching, and start vetting. Start sorting and organizing the data of what I have seen, and what I have come to know. In writing. In solid, well-formed words on a page.

But why publicly? Why blog? I guess because although writing is an intensely personally act, for me it is also a craft. An art in which the pleasure of crystallization and refinement come only with the polish of creative license and the tantalization of an audience, real or imagined. Only then does it move from a mind purge or a rant to a performance- something of me, and created by me, and yet separate and apart from me at the same time.

So I’ve come to this blog. To write. To sense make. To know. And maybe even to be read. Besides, I have to stop emailing my friends beautifully written treatises and guest-posts for their blogs. Although it gives me pleasure to write them, I think it only makes people feel guilty for not responding in kind, when what I really want is an outlet, and a dress rehearsal. But now I find that it is time for my own opening night, to put my own performance piece on stage.

Lights! Camera! This is my brain….ON.