On The Fritz

It has come to my attention that I have posted a grand total of three times in the year 2025. After the last tumultuous years, I understand you may feel there is cause for concern, but it’s not what you think.

This spring I took an online writing course. I get compliments on my blog and the articles I write, but I really only have one style, so I don’t feel my skill set translates clearly to other forms of writing. If I want to become a better writer, and someone who can write for other publications in a variety of styles, I need to learn new things. So, I took a content writing course.

The class was on my own time, but with several deadlines every week to keep me up to date and chugging along. I only had a few live workshops, and the rest I completed between work and kids and sleep. I didn’t write for pleasure at all during that period. For one, even though all my class feedback was positive, I started to feel like I am, at best, an okay writer. I was already hedging, and decided not to take an editing course because I felt I would get bogged down and overwhelmed. If you don’t use it, you lose it, right? Though I often write for fun, it’s been a very long time since I took a class. Or had homework. Or used a computer for anything other than blogging and email.

Every task felt like it took me an eternity. Once I cleared the hurdles that were technology based (I envy my kids who are immersed in computer skills at school), I’d panic about the topic I needed to select, or the opening sentence. The frequent deadlines were a pain, but they forced me to just do it. If I’d had a month for each project, I would have waited until the last minute to start anyway, because I wasn’t sure of myself. Even if I’d had the time to blog, I wouldn’t have. I felt unsure of everything.

Much like taking a hiatus from fitness, it’s hard to start writing again. Everything hurts. Especially with something like a blog, when I haven’t posted in months, I should have something profound to share when I finally update my page. And if I don’t feel profoundly inspired, I put it off. The result is a sort of literary constipation. Or, less graphically, writer’s block.

I finished my class with an A just as school let out for the summer. My kids have been back and forth between our house and their dad’s, which should have given me time to write. But I couldn’t. I prioritized other things, or just sat in a stupor, all while avoiding my laptop. It’s not just the blog, either. I occasionally write articles for an online magazine, and I didn’t submit anything. I have two first draft manuscripts I could edit, but I didn’t look at them. I’ve been working on a third book, but I neglected that as well. Even friends who asked me to look over their writing didn’t get much out of me in the way of editing. I’d tell myself I needed to go live my life so I’d have things to write about. I lived. But I didn’t write.

I don’t really know what happened. Maybe my confidence was shaken by the course I took. Maybe it just drained me to try and kickstart my old student brain while also working and caring for my kids. It’s not as though I took a full college class – it was a certificate course. Maybe the block has a root cause I haven’t discovered yet.

Sometimes I feel blocked when I read something really beautiful, like Joan Didion, or the recently deceased poet Andrea Gibson. Their words can make me abandon all hope of producing anything of value. Sometimes the opposite is true. I’ll read a news article with silly errors, or a miserable story on a website that has denied my submissions, and consider chucking this laptop into the bayou. Often, I don’t write because I don’t feel I have anything of value to offer. Or because my personal life is not sharable for the moment.

This blog is personal. I’ve had it long enough to have shared some big moments publicly. I sometimes struggle with what to share, because the most feedback always comes from transparent works, like discussing dating, divorce, health problems, and motherhood. Sometimes, though, I don’t feel ready to share everything, even though it’s always my most popular contect. It’s not as though I’m holding back major news, I just spend significant energy weighing what to talk about.

Hopefully this riveting post is the drafted bowel movement that gets me writing regularly again. The bran flakes for my creative mind. If not, I fear I will beat the poo metaphor to death.