I am sitting at my favorite spot at West Side Station, sipping my second cup of really good coffee. I have no idea what this post will be about, or even if it will be fit to be read.

Writing has been hard for me recently. It is not for lack of things to write about. Far from it. Every moment of my days seems full of fodder to write about. Events, people, places, emotions pile up like last week’s newspapers, each with its own story, each with its own lesson.

And, I have come to realize, that is a bit reason I write. I write to figure things out. I write to extract lessons from my life. I begin my days with a routine that includes journaling.

I have journaled since I was in college. My mom got me started, giving me an empty journal one Christmas and telling me that she felt like it would be good for me. And it has been. At times in my life, it has been my private madhouse, where I ranted and raved about my life. (I still do some of that.). I often say I want my journals burnt when I die, or I will be portrayed by anyone who reads them as a madman.

In reality, it was where I let the madness out and corralled it and left it so that I could go through the rest of my day relatively sane.

I stopped for a while, in the last years of my marriage. Like so many healthy things in my life, I slowly let it go over time as other things, the prosaic, responsible things of life took over my time. All those things were good in themselves – a high-powered career, active in the church, a great house with a few acres to maintain, my marriage, my kids. I won’t blame the lack of journaling for the marriage’s end, but there was something missing in those years. I was not taking the time to reflect, to connect my own dots.

And that is what writing lets me do. It helps me see things I don’t seem to see when I don’t write. It helps me carve through the noise and find the music in a way nothing else seems to do.

I began writing again at the urging of my counselor. It was so hard. I was so rusty. The habit of thirty years had become moribund and stiff. It felt awkward, forced. And mostly, it was pretty bad. All the skill at writing, at tapping into my emotions and putting them into words had left. I felt like a teenager, struggling to find the words for the things I was feeling.

She had me begin by keeping the journal. She had me begin by reflecting over the feelings of the day before. What had I felt? Why? It was sort of a list at that point. “I felt happy when this happened.” I felt sad when this happened.” Honestly, reading it was like reading something a four-year-old wrote.

Over time, I got better. My list of emotions grew longer. They became better defined. I wasn’t sad, I was discouraged, disappointed, struggling. And I began to add more to each emotion I felt. I would tell the story of what had made me feel that way. I would ponder why it left me feeling this way or that. I would delve into the past, wrestle with my actions, look into my soul.

Poetry is my best medium. When people ask me what I do, they are generally looking for what I do. But if I were honest, I would tell them I was a poet. Poetry sings to me. Carving an emotion out of an image, slowly paring back the fluff to find the essence is something I wrestle to do in my life, and poetry is a just that for me.

Which, I think, is why it’s coming slow right now. It could be about of depression sneaking in. Depression can do that during the holidays. But I don’t think that is what is going in. I think I’m just in an even-keeled place right now. Nothing is gloriously wonderful or unbearably hard. It’s all kind of flat. And flat does not inspire. It’s hard to write about flat.

Oh, I could write about a memory. Or a speculation. And I could do it pretty well. I am fairly talented and fairly skilled. I can craft good words out of most anything. I do just that out of my work as a copywriter. But when writing personal things. I am not a storyteller like some of my friends. I have a sense of humor, but I’ll never be a humorist. I am a poet. I am a watcher and a wrestler and a wonderer. I don’t do well with flat. There needs to be passion, whether it is positive like love, excitement or joy; or negative like grief, pain or loss.

Even when I write prose, which comes easier but I don’t do as well as poetry. There is a different discipline to prose that is hard for me. Now and then, like my recent post about community, or some of my writings on depression, the emotion kicks in and I do pretty well, but mostly my prose feels… well….. flat.

I am writing a novel, and I am near the end. It’s taken me a long time to write it. Like many things I write, it began one way, and it is ending as something else. I began with a story, something very abstract, just an idea of something that might be interesting. But somehow, as I have moved forward, it became less a story than my story. And it went from easy to write, to hard. A couple hundred page prose poem, with me trying to strip everything down to its essence.

That doesn’t work in novels, I think. Or at least, it’s hard. In long form writing, whether it’s a series of stories or a novel or a non-fiction book, the details matter, but in a different way than in poetry. In poetry, you are being blatant in making every word count. In a novel, every word counts but in a different way. They build a fabric, a background that has to be more subtle, more all encompassing. It’s like the difference between creating a 30-second ad and a two-hour feature length film. There are layers after layers. A hard thing for me to do after spending a lifetime peeling things down to an essence.

I am also nervous as I finish. I have people tell me that I expose myself a lot with my poetry and essays. Maybe I do. I don’t think about it much. But in a longer form like a novel, I feel far more exposed. I only just realized that. The story is not mine, but the emotions are, a couple of hundred pages of them. I far prefer to expose myself in dribs and drabs. It’s safer. You can always stop if it becomes too hard. You can always withdraw. Not so in a novel.

But then, much of the past ten years has been about fighting the urge to withdraw. That’s my nature. And became more my nature after my marriage and my life came unraveled. What I wanted to do is just crawl in my hole and quietly wither way. People do it all the time. They gently disappear. It’s painful to disappear, but it’s safe.

At least, it feels safe. It’s not really. Not if we want to live, not just exist. Not if we think we are placed on this earth to help others, which I do. And so, slowly, oh so slowly, I have stuck my head out of my shell. I joined things. I talked to people. I began to listen to the world around me. I began to listen to myself and share. And I wrote and out it “out there”. It was hard then, and it is hard now. I suspect it will never be easy again.

And so I write. Because it is and always has been part of my path to sanity. Because now and then, my words resonate and help someone.

And that is worth being uncomfortable for. That is worth the discipline of writing even when I don’t feel like it.

Like today.

Be well. Travel wisely,

Tom