Something to be said

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I am losing my touch. I’m not sure what sort of writerly expertise I expect out of myself, but the last few weeks have been too rife with exposition, italics, and extreme punctuation for my taste. When I re-read the posts, I’m not sure who it is who wrote them, and I’m even less sure that I want it to have been me.

Although I make a conscious effort not to obsess over the numbers — my minimum comment threshold for self-validation is pretty low — the realization that I did not particularly like what I was publishing made its initial dent in my brain at the end of July. I was skimming the previous month’s posts to pick out the ones I would categorize as favorites. There’s no metric for what makes me add that tag; it’s just a sense of personal affection for a certain piece that makes me sigh and think wistfully, “Yeah, that was a pretty good one.” During that most recent review, I only really liked one post. Upon further examination, the most recent one before that was a whole two months earlier. I was rather stunned. In three months, I had produced a scant two posts that rang true to me.

I scanned the posts that make up my favorites category. It seemed as though a lot of the pieces that are the most genuine to me were borne of desperation, fatigue, and stress. Writing was cathartic in those situations, and the mere practice of finding the right way to articulate what was a difficult situation made it seem less daunting. Oddly enough, the source of my furrowed brow is that I have a strange sensation that my relatively even-keeled life is bereft of material for anxiety-ridden essays. My job is fine, the car is running, Ted is getting into a routine, I’m halfway through my running program, and there has been no major drama of which to speak. So, what’s the problem?

I contemplated this existential question while I sat outside with Ted last evening. JG was at a volleyball league meeting, and I decided to put the invisible fence collar on Ted so that he could amble around on his own. I sat on a beach chair on the deck with a citronella candle burning pungently at my feet and the makings of a volleyball scarf in my lap. The air was unseasonably crisp for this time of year, and I thrilled at being comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt. A raucous bird scolded me from a nearby tree, and Ted sat up pertly to watch something out of my line of sight. Between rows of blue and white yarn, I thought about bringing down a laptop to fulfill my vague need to check my e-mail and type away on a keyboard, but I thought better of it. What did I need to type, exactly? How I am displeased with being even remotely content because it makes for boring blog posts? How I should stir up some controversy in my life so I have something to gripe about later? How I should be grateful that I have a quiet night at home with the dog, who was happily rolling around in the yard, and I should be so easily satisfied?

I put down my knitting and got up to run around with Ted. Maybe I wasn’t plumbing the depths of human emotion, but there’s something to be said for chasing a little white dog in the grass.