Writing about myself was how I learned myself. Before I understood my extreme sensitivity, before I knew that I was sucking up everybody else's emotion and making it my own, before I had any notion of my own operating system. In those darker years, I would take the mess of my life and feelings and start writing a blog post. By the time I was done, I had cracked open the cement box of whatever was weighing me down and let in some light.
I adored blogging. Back in 2006, I started a blog called Moose in the Kitchen to help me write everyday. It was my thing for years. Talking about squirrels and feelings helped me sort through the tangles of my life. It helped me feel less isolated in whatever prison I had built in my head. Words were the only real power I wielded at that time. Some of my first channeling came through in that space, though I didn't know to call it that.
In the years before all this intuitive work, my writing was funny and self-deprecating and, more often than was probably healthy, self-flagellating. But it was a sacred space. My sanctuary. Writing myself to answers felt like magic. It was magic.
Social media came along and blogging was no longer the only way we could interface via screen. Blogging started becoming used in business and boundaries got confused. Self-sabotage kicked in, as self-sabotage does. I stepped away from writing to focus on my intuitive work and amusing self-deprecation cannon-balled into rampant earnestness.
But life just doesn't work as well when I'm not playing with words. When you're a writer who doesn't write, the wheels start coming off the bus. It's not noticeable immediately, but after awhile you're hopping down the road in circles, like a dizzy three-legged dog.
Blogging like it's 2006 means not taking myself so seriously, not taking the words so seriously. I wrote thousands of words every month and none of them had an agenda. Words are here to be played with. Because play is where the magic lives. Magic tends to run screaming when I decide I need my writing to be a certain way or do a certain thing for my life.
Enough with that, self.
I want to find the sweet spot between the wild polarities of the blogging 20-something who hated herself because she was locked in a brain that tried to put her in the context of the normal world and the intuitive 30-something who sees so much bright light that she gets a bit overbearing at times. I've been trying to think my way there, but thinking rarely works. Because our brains, wondrous machines though they are, are only capable of spitting back canned recordings of where we've been. They aren't capable of navigating unknown terrain.
Only in the space of imagination and play can that new terrain begin to unfold. So it's time to write myself into a new space instead of trying to think my way there.
So I'm going to blog like it's 2006. For me. For whoever might want to read it. Not to establish myself as an authority in anything (I am quite literally an authority in nothing except my own journey, and I often need other people to tell me things about that journey). Not to further any quest or agenda I might have. Because agendas are exhaustingly unproductive and quests never lead where you were expecting anyway.
Since trying to guide my life and my story toward where I think it should go has left me dazed and wondering where seven years went, I'm just going to tell my story. I'm just going to show up to the words the way I used to, the way I love to do, and let them tell me what I need to know.