I gave up writing last summer.

I gave up writing last summer.  

I don't mean that I actually stopped writing, but only that I stopped a certain type of writing.  I stopped blogging and writing about things I care about, things I'm learning, things I want to talk about.  I stopped in order to finish writing my thesis.  To maintain a little bit of sanity, I started journaling again.  Journaling is a little bit like blogging, but I have more incomplete random thoughts and even incomplete sentences because no one else will read my journal.  Until I die.  (I harbor fantasies of someone reading my journal and discovering my brilliance after I am gone.)  

I took a brief trip to Palm Springs after finishing my thesis and started writing again.  I planned to polish up some of the better entries and hopefully submit them to publishers.  It felt good to create word pictures and images.  It felt really good to explore and share my ideas and thoughts.  I had no teaching jobs lined up, and so this seemed like a good plan.  It was my only plan.

I left Palm Springs on a Wednesday and immediately got two classes.  That turned into five plus and internship, and I also signed up for a linguistics class.  I stopped writing again.  I stopped a lot of other things again too, like hanging out with friends and reading.  Sometimes I felt like I was going crazy.  

This semester is a little more sane, and so I'm trying to figure how to be myself again.  I'm reading four challenging books and several blogs, bouncing around between the book of Mark, favorite Psalms, and Colossians.  I'm still journaling.  I'm trying to see friends, although that's sporadic.  And I think about writing, themes to discuss and ideas to toss around.

Now it's time to write.