I Started a Blog Post...

When you haven’t written in forever, it becomes incrementally harder to pick up the figurative pen. Kind of like when you haven’t called your mom or your dad in a month or two, it’s awkward at first when you finally call. It feels stilted and unnatural. There are so many stories to tell and yet they all seem so old and stale and irrelevant days or weeks or months after the fact.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

I have started at least a dozen blog posts in the last 4 months. I started a post about the holidays and rewriting family traditions during a pandemic. I started a post about traveling to Arizona, and how conflicted and excited and thankful I was. I started a post about trying to find ways to take care of myself and remember my own beauty, even as I stare at the scale in horror, even as I refuse to wear jeans because I am so uncomfortable, even as I buy clothes online in yet another size, hoping that maybe this time I’ll feel pretty.

I started a post about the ridiculousness of shoving standardized testing down the throats of our children during a pandemic, how absolutely ridiculous and meaningless that concept even is. When our students and our teachers are struggling, let’s isolate and ostracize them even more by forcing them to take bullshit tests that tell us what we already know: their SES and their mom’s educational background.

I started a post about waiting, endlessly waiting, to get back some of the things I love. Drinking an IPA with my guy at the rail of my favorite bar. Hanging out with the roller derby crowd. Going to a movie. Ordering a meal at an actual restaurant instead of taking home another bag of food from the drive-through window, only to realize that they fucked it up and put cheese on my kid’s burger AGAIN.

I started a post about the National Anthem. I started a post about The Love Boat. I started a post about triage teaching. I started a post about the low birth rate in the United States. I started a post about my white privilege. I started a post about Dr. Seuss. I started a post about anti-racist teaching, and how terrifying that is, knowing that any minute now, an angry white dad and a fragile white mom will try to once again threaten my job because of my “liberal agenda.” 

And I started a post about leaving toxic relationships and finally giving away that last piece of clothing from my old job, finally erasing that domain and rebranding my website, finally deleting those old logins and passwords from my Chromebook, and finally realizing that almost everyone there never really was a true friend, and that maybe I'm okay with that.

When you haven’t written an actual post in forever, it seems like every abandoned idea you’re sitting on is old, the relevance has passed, and you’ve got nothing important to say.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

But sometimes you accidentally butt-dial your dad, and even though the conversation is stilted and awkward, you are so happy to just hear his voice. Sometimes you call your mom because, even though you don’t have any good stories to tell, you just want to say hi.

Sometimes you start a new post and you write about how you haven’t written in months. Sometimes you decide that you’ll take the leap, finish the post about nothing, and actually publish it this time.