Trouble writing

I've had a hard time writing this summer, or wanting to spend time in the office. At the same time, I've been struggling with my faith and also an overall sense of purpose. The two, for me anyway, have always seemed to go hand in hand. When I'm in tune spiritually, I also tend to write a lot, there's an overflow of ideas and a sense of purpose and that what goes on in my life and in the world matters. In the last year there have been a number of transitions and a few relationship blows that have impacted me more than I knew. For some, they would right more in these situations. For me, it was just the opposite.

First, blogging. When I began blogging it was in the midst of a community of guys who mostly knew each other, but as we began writing we came to realize how little we had actually known each other, and it was eye opening, cleansing, and refreshing to see the things the others were thinking about, dreaming about, or struggling with. Sometimes narcissism crept in (and I'm not sure it's ever totally absent from public writing), but mostly it was a good thing. Others came to the site and we began to realize there's a whole blogging world out there, and we were reading others and being read, and the community was beyond us.

But there's something about writing your thoughts down and having friends and anonymous strangers commenting and dialogging with what you've written. My friend Enemy has talked through this as well: on the one hand there's the affirmation and the strokes of someone noticing what you've written (we want this), and at the same time there's pressure, the voice that says "Now you have to have someone's approval. What if they don't like where you're going with the story? What if they don't like what you've written? What if they STOP reading?" It's no longer personal, but public, and unlike books, the reviews come right away.

In the midst of it, I've wondered if I have anything to say. I've felt paralyzed, sick of the narcissism in my own writing and in the blogging world in general, though I've also experienced the healing and community of hearing from others and sharing with them (a positive aspect of blogging). You come to realize that in a world of 6 billion people (and thousands of bloggers) one voice is small in the crowd.

So I've wanted to begin to tell a story that's not just my story, but our story. The thing about Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Brooks, Herbert and others is that they create an entire world and invite readers into that world. In the midst they find the author's world, but find so much more. They find bits and pieces of themselves, how people are, how they should be, comments on politics and social structures and the epic questions of good and evil and ethics and the struggles of growing up, making good choices, or facing our fears. And they do this in ways that no lecture or sermon could: they show rather than tell. They comment on the world around us by having us look at a reflection, a mirror, doppelganger, or through the back door.

I've gone from living in a small town to big cities, to a small town once again, yet there are stories here if one knows how to look for them. There's a friend of mine who has a growing brain tumor. He had surgery a couple weeks ago, but the growth has come back, fast. I saw him yesterday, realizing it may be one of the last times I see him. He was a friend of my parents, and has since become a good friend to me, and it hurt talking with him, seeing his weakness, seeing that we both knew the time may be short.

There are the 14-year old guys I take taekwondo with. I went to one of the guy's birthday parties on Saturday, took him some pellets for his air soft gun, and was glad I went. There's going to church and seeing a girl I care about, yet not being able to talk with her since we broke up. There's going to the park to watch people and deer and birds in the woods, or, on a creepy note, to have been stalked/checked out by a guy (doubly creepy since I'm not gay and his interest made me feel uncomfortable). There's the guy who mows lawns and rides through town on his bike, the men and women who hang out at the Arcade (restaurant) on Saturday mornings to drink coffee and catch up on gossip, there's spreading mulch in a garden with friends, there's the demolition derby and Nascar racing on Saturday nights that the people in town go crazy over. There's the nursing home in town that has become a multi-state operation, the prison just outside of town, two private colleges, hundreds of bars and churches. There are good cops and corrupt cops in town, good politicians and corrupt ones.

I don't know what this next year will be like, but I'd like to start writing again.