dealt with the fallout from that great big anti-climax that is publishing your first book. It saw me sink deeper and deeper into what was first diagnosed as post-partum depression. For years, every Sunday, I diligently posted something, even when I felt I had nothing worth saying, even as I began to wonder if I would ever having anything worth saying again.  

And then, finally, I stopped. There are long explanations for why I stopped blogging, and there are short, oversimplified explanations. There are complicated, nuanced, messy explanations, too, but ultimately, there’s no real answer. I just felt like that chapter of my life was over. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

Savvy writers and readers out there will recognize the ambiguity of that pronoun: it. Did I not want to write anymore, or did I just not want to blog anymore? The answer is, I wasn’t sure. For sure the latter, but the real question I was dealing with, although in a very deep-down, don’t-admit-it-lest-it-become-real way, was the former: did I even want to write at all anymore? Perhaps writing had become just another failed hobby. Perhaps writing had turned from something that enriched my life to something that bogged me down, made me feel bad about myself, something that made my life a little less worth living.

Of course, it took me years to really accept that this question was one with which I had been struggling. In fact, it wasn’t until just a few months ago, when a new therapist suggested that I give myself permission to not write for a while and just see how that felt, that I really let myself consciously consider that I had turned writing into another thing to get on myself about, another reason to hate my own life.

So I did it. I stopped writing, but not like I had before. I consciously, intentionally stopped. I decided. What’s that cliché? If you love something, let it go. If it loves you, it will return? Well, if that's true, I don’t know whether writing loves me or not. It certainly didn’t seem to be shedding too many tears after I cut it loose. I knew from friends and friends of friends that it was making out just fine without me. I mean, I don’t want to be judgy or anything, but like, seriously, I hope it was using protection.

And it’s not like writing exactly tried to get back together with me. I’d hear from it now and then: a quick text to say hello, a Facebook post—“Hey, did you see this article? Thought you might be interested”—that sort of thing. But I knew it missed me, and I missed it. We were both happier and healthier now, but we missed each other all the same. Strange how things like that go.

So we’ve decided to be friends, or friends with benefits, or in an open relationship, or however you want to finish this metaphor. We’re going to hang out, still, but not exclusively. The passion that we used to feel for each other has dimmed, yes, but there’s a much healthier give-and-take to our relationship now. I’m allowed to hang with my family without feeling guilty. I can binge watch American Horror Story and it can go spend the night with another writer. It can spend more than the night—I don’t care. It can boost another writer to the best-seller list, and we’re still cool.

‘Cause me and writing, we have something special. I’m not jealous of the time it spends with others, and it’s not jealous of the time I choose not to spend with it. We can have our time together, and we can have our time apart. We can love each other and love other things and other people too.

So I guess I decided that I do want to be a writer, but not with a capital W, you know? I want to write, and I want to sew, and I want to play piano when I feel like it and dance around the house with my daughter and her stuffies when I feel like it. I want writing to be a release—an art, not a job. Something that I do because it makes me happy, not something I do because I’ve decided that this is who I am.

I began keeping a writing blog, which changed names, urls, and overall goals several times throughout the course of its existence, when I was an as-yet unpublished MFA student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The blog was there with me as I began to get my work published, as I created then gave up on my own online literary journal (who knew running a literary journal would be so much work?), as I took a job working as an Associate Editor for another journal (Bound Off), and as I published my first, award-winning short story collection. The blog was there with me as I

A Time to Write
February 25, 2016

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