jamelah.net

I don’t write anymore, and I want to. I used to have a blog that people used to read and I used to make people laugh with things I wrote, and sometimes I wrote things that weren’t funny at all, and then I stopped having a blog, and now I’m back. (Actually back, not republishing archives and unwittingly spamming folks who are still subscribed!) I don’t like these “I used to, and then, but now” kind of posts, and honestly, I’ve written a lot of them over the past several years because they’re hard to avoid when you’ve had a website as long as I have, but I don’t want to do that today.

I write because I used to be good at writing, because I was a lonely kid who had to figure out what to do with my overactive imagination, who read Little Women and Anne of Green Gables and believed that writing was what girls grew up to do. I am not a writer, not really, not anymore. I have writing all over the place, scattered in corners of the internet, and in a few books and articles, but I haven’t kept up with it. I don’t know if I’m good at it anymore.

I just did it, didn’t I, that “I used to, and then, but now” thing. It’s very hard to avoid, like I feel I have to justify throwing some paragraphs onto this website I pay for after not having put anything on it for so long. I don’t, though. Have to justify myself, that is. I have enough bona fides, though I don’t think any of them will matter to anyone, and they don’t really even matter to me.

The archives of this site are full of writing from the writer I used to be, and maybe I still am that writer, I don’t know, but I am interested in finding out what writer I am now. It may turn out that I really don’t like writing anymore, but I’m going to give it a shot for awhile and see where it goes.

I don’t have a plan. I do have some things to say, about the world, about my place in it, about my garden, about cooking dinners, about how many times I have to say “Yes, but maybe you could try getting the garbage IN the garbage can?” to children, about photos I take, about lots of things. I still have no aspirations to be a single-purpose blogger about food or plants or skincare or photography or anything else. My interests and my thoughts are too widely varied. I just want to write some things. I want that to feel natural again. I have tried coming back here many times over the past few years and stared blankly at the new post screen and then left without writing anything. I want to stop doing that.

I write because every time I do, it’s a chance to figure out a new thing. Language is the ultimate puzzle for me to solve, and I still haven’t quite gotten how to map what is in my head and what is in my heart in words that someone else can follow. But I want to try.

So, hello again.