There's this thing that happens to Bloggers, as many of my more legitimate blogging friends must know, where sometimes you can't bear to blog. It isn't that you don't have anything to say. It could be a number of things. You want to blog about things too personal. You want to whine, kvetch and moan in a way that might just make your friends think twice about you, and your visitors from stopping by ever again. If you blog, you really won't get anything else done and you have deadlines for THOSe things. So you adopt little tricks to fill the days, to keep your blog fresh, like the Wednesday Essay. This has the added bonus of putting really smart, interesting writers' work up, which can on occasion make you look better...or worse, as the case may be.

Why am I talking in the second person??

A friend of mine recently said she missed my former posts, which I thought of as whiny, but which she graciously referred to as "probing." I still think she was being overly-kind, but I'm trying to decide what exactly it was that I had to say before. It feels like I was doing an awful lot of lamenting about the sad state of publishing. Or the sad state of my publishing. Or the difficulty of getting an agent or any number of things.

But I don't feel like re-reading my old posts, so instead I'll share a tiny epiphany I've had about myself. I'm wishy-washy. I like people a lot. I like my friends, but often I go into this kind of mode, a kind of withdrawal mode where the energy to go forward into the world feels so huge, I just don't bother. I think lovingly of my friends, but I don't call them. That isn't the epiphany. The fact is, that when I do start to slide into one of my cave-like funks and then I go out and do something, get stimulation, interact in a meaningful way in the world, I find that I feel better. And quickly. Like I took a pill or something. The problem is that the me in her little isolated cave doesn't remember how she will feel after she consents to engage with the world.

So I kind of wonder how many opportunities for feeling better I've missed out on.

JPR