Why Write

Good morning,

I've been thinking about this blog, lately, mainly on the topics of what it is and whether I want to continue. Sometimes I feel like the writing I do is wonderful for me and keeps my juices flowing, helps others, and is simply my way of riding the waves of inspiration I feel in the morning. Other times, I feel like Lindspiration is one giant procrastination tool! Like I could be doing so many other things when I'm writing, such as rehearsing lines for a show or working on my voice. Stretching. Reading a novel. Watching TV.

I used to feel MUCH freer in myself to write more candidly and emotionally. That's changed. While I don't read my old posts and try not to look back in judgment, I do feel a little weird when I think about the personal content I've offered up here and try to gratefully accept that it was helpful to some and just what I needed and wanted to write at the time. I wonder if it's helping me to share anything of myself anymore and am curious what the dwindling desire is about. I still feel a need to write but want it to go someplace else, such as into a play or a screenplay. Sometimes blogging feels like I'm having a conversation while blind and deaf in that I can't see or hear any reader's response to my words at all. I know that's what writers do -- if this were in book or magazine form I'd be comfortable knowing that what happens between you and the paper is not my business -- but because the web is a portal of virtual conversations, I think I feel like I want to engage readers to say something, which doesn't happen often on this blog, probably because I don't ask...

On Friday night I saw the play Other Desert Cities, in which Aussie actress Rachel Griffith takes her turn as Brooke Wyeth, an east coast, Ivy League educated, Jewish, 30-something, single writer who battles depression and whose memoir, Love & Mercy, is about to be published (in sections) in The New Yorker magazine. She meets up with her parents and brother over the holidays to get their blessing, not an easy feat since L&M will soon reveal the deepest, darkest truths of their family for all the world to read. It was a fascinating drama and I could relate to Brooke (also my middle name) and her drive to write, something which stemmed from her desire to find answers to questions she was carrying around inside of her, questions about her older brother's death and her parents' role in it, questions which, unanswered, became a certain kind of torture.

I feel myself skating around the edges of a rink and eager to move closer to the center, to really get into truths, events and aspects of my past. At this point, it feels like the only way I could really understand myself and move forward but at the same time, I know that the place to be is in the here and now. I have many "energetic anchors" that connect me to my past and I don't want to wait until I write my story to be able to move past the past. When I take steps to let go of the need to know, I experience rapid, accelerated growth, the kind that trumps a therapeutic insight or epiphany (not to discount, those are great, too). Still, it's hard.

Even now, I am looking at my laptop which crashed a few months ago and I am terrified to toss the thing. On it is a ton of writing and rants that weren't backed up, writing I may be able to salvage with a techie expert's help (doubtful, according to the Mac Genius) but that I've decided isn't really worth saving! Still, I'm attached. So, it sits on my shelf, a Macbook of memories, a diary of drama and in many cases drivel, my feelings about events which are over.

Maybe it's normal to feel grief. This silent listener recorded my earliest musings and cries, only to have the computer version of a heart attack and take my writing with it to the other side. Maybe it's normal to feel fear, too. What are we without our past perceptions, observations, attachments. I'll never forget during Hurricane Gloria (sometime in the 80s when I was 10 or 11 years old) when we were in the sunny eye of the storm, I walked out of my house on Long Island to find a nest that had been thrown from the tree outside my bedroom window onto our driveway. In it were 3 or 4 little newborn birds. Up in the tree, the mother bird was screaming at the top of her little bird lungs while down below her little ones did the same. It was an unnatural, premature separation and as much as I feel as vulnerable as the little chicks, I can see how that is only a feeling.

The truth is that I can take care of myself and no longer need the past in any way, shape or form to protect me from begin open to the moment. And that is what I think the past does more than anything else. It keeps us from being here because HERE in the unknown, without attachments to all we think we are based on what we went through from birth to the present moment, can feel really scary.

Probably more than anything else, this blog's become a place I can clarify my thinking and also do some healing. It's allowed me to guide myself and others in some way. It's made me realize that I desire connection and speaking is a way to start that ball rolling. It brings me tremendous joy to touch another person's life through my words, not only because I feel heard but because I feel useful. So, thank you for reading my work.


Lindsay