Writer’s Block

I feel like I’ve been staring at a blank page for weeks. Words all jumbled together in my head, unable to organize into anything coherent.

Dozens of times I’ve sat down to open the multiple posts that are almost finished. The one on body image, the gentle parenting posts, another post on gender roles. My post on how quiverfull theology is narcissistic, the one on suicide, the post on style and embracing who I am.

I write a few sentences, and stop.

I think about all the drama surrounding the discovery of my blog. People who have read my blog and now think they know me, people who haven’t read any of it but have heard about my blog and now think they know me. As if my blog is somehow the sum of my entire life’s experience, or details every interaction with every person I know. It’s uncomfortable knowing that anything I write will be scrutinized. I think I seriously underestimated the anger my blog would cause, and overestimated my strength to be vulnerable. I’ve been called bitter and hateful and a liar. I’ve been told that I am never to write about certain people again, even though I hardly mentioned them to begin with. It makes me wonder what the reaction will be when my parents find this blog.

Part of me wants to crawl back into my shell, surely I can pretend to be who everyone wants me to be. Wouldn’t it be easier to just be quiet and compliant? Then again, I never was very good at lying. If anyone ever asks me questions straight out, I always answer as truthfully as I can. It’s just no one ever really bothered to ask me about myself, except my husband and my sister. Sometimes I wish I had never blogged at all, then I wouldn’t have people who feel betrayed by me because they don’t really know me that well. I wouldn’t have people acting as though anything they say can and will be used against them on my blog. I could go back to being the fairly quiet person that everyone was OK with, instead of someone who has issues with many Christian teachings and different opinions than the people I’m related too. But I don’t really want that. I would rather be who I am with the flaws and opinions and ideas and beliefs and experiences I have.

It’s too exhausting to be anyone else.

But it has still been hard to write. It’s been hard to write, knowing that people are waiting to find fault.

When I am stressed, I tend to write or cook. And since I haven’t been writing as much, I’ve been in my kitchen more. So we’ve baked pumpkin cake with cream cheese frosting, zucchini-carrot bread with cranberries in it and chocolate-chocolate chip cookies. I made lemon and garlic salmon, and herbed roasted potato’s. I roasted a Turkey with BBQ spices and then made a soup from the leftovers. We made curried rice, meatloaf and honey roasted butternut squash.

We pile the dishes in the sink. The house smells delicious, the kitchen is a disaster.

The kids lick the beaters and I sit down in front of the computer and stare at the blank screen, my fingers on the keys. I’ve always written whatever is bursting out of me, and I know that’s where I have to start. So I wrote this, letting out all the jumbled thoughts in my head. And now I’m hitting publish, and I’m betting the writer’s block will be gone.