Throwing It Out There

I've found myself, lately, with a bit of a negative mantra. "I can't write." I've been telling everyone around me. Friends, family, strangers, myself. It is not for lack of desire, or inspiration; there simply seems a gag over my ability to articulate my thoughts onto my blog. Blog, the word begs of fluid babble, yet for the past months I have only managed to post one isolated image after another. Images wreaking with symbolism, one stacked on top of the next. Testaments of my determination to keep my little blog alive, evidence of my inability to utter a word.

I have received all sorts of encouragement to continue to write, even a suggestion from a stranger that the world needs my voice. Ha! However, the hacked out rambling of today's post comes from one of my best friends telling me not to worry about it. The absence of prodding, the subtle acceptance of letting it go pissed me off. So here I am, defying limp acquiescence, vomiting out all of the nothing I have to say. A solid start?

If I was not so insecure in my new found perspective of the world, I would love to share my thoughts on Foster Farms chicken and the Federal shut down; how the media suggested we should freak out because federal inspectors were kept from discovering the samonela lurking under plastic packaging, waiting to infect the helpless masses who have no common sense about proper food handling and preparation. I could muse over the similar outrage that congress's gym was open in the wake of a shut down, how everyone was bug-eyed-outraged because it stayed open, but not as much that the government ceased to operate for lack of agreement to get our great nation into more suffocating debt (and congress has a gym).

It would be interesting, I think, to analyze the reality that the whole fight in DC is to raise the debt ceiling so we can have FREE health care. Wouldn't we be avoiding more debt if it was free? And speaking of free, I have pondered sputtering about the FREE public school day for homeschooled kids. It's like sugar free pure sugar, stink free shit, a hairless mustache. 

But I do feel insecure and that keeps me silent because I know good and well that my meek observations come from my completely narrow perspective and I would likely offend people who I like, and they and others could possibly share with me highly defensive reactions and point out to me, from their own narrow perspectives why I am wrong and I might have to defend myself and my weak perspective. What is worse, is that people I don't even know might attack me. What is more likely is that no one would even read it and my rant would be like a sad message in a bottle, filling and sinking and forgotten.

I thought I could simply avoid all reactive content, keep it light. Light about what? I left Costa Rica, there are no more adventures of a young mother in a tropical, foreign country. No more laughs about language goof ups and vents about local culture, greedy developers and life in a vertical sea. 

So here I am, defiant but honestly stuck. Do I dive into my internal struggles as an artist? Share my wisdom as a homeschooling mom? Pick apart the delicate layers of my life and reveal all? Do I take it to the absurd and catalogue the many ways I show I'm pushing 40? Does anyone really care? Really?  

Yes, I'm lacking direction, void of content and desperate to find it. But, I have begun; the voice inside my head has successfully flowed through my fingers as I type and I have taken a step to beginning again. Will I stumble along the way? No doubt, but walking starts with struggle.