Accepting Discipline

This writing in a blog is making me have to have goals and such. Not my usual way of writing.

I mostly learned to write through years of keeping highly personal and emotional journals. Long before Julia Cameron arrived on the scene, someone gave me a book entitled The New Diary by Tristine Rainer. I learned lots of techniques from that book, and believe using those skills enabled me to achieve a certain honesty in my writing.

Although I often shared entries from my journals, I also valued the privacy and safety that writing only for myself gave me. In that safe space, I gave myself free rein. I felt free to write exactly what I was feeling, even if the subject matter was far too personal to share with the wider world.

All writers, I assume, need that space to create. I think that safe space played a large part in my learning to accept myself for who I am. wrinkles and all, as they say. As expressing my emotions became easier, I gradually veered away from a regular writing practice. I’ve grieved that loss for half a lifetime, but have never developed the discipline to recover that lost identity. I’m trying to reclaim this most important facet of my personality now.

I’ve been thinking that writing a blog is similar to writing a column for a newspaper or magazine. Wherever my writing starts, the end result must encapsulate a certain subject, rather than becoming one of my infamous tangential journeys through the tangle of my thoughts. This is a new, and rather fascinating, discipline. I think I’m ready. I think I like it.