A new entry

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but my sister is one of the coolest people I know. There are so many reasons for this that listing them seems like an insurmountable task, but I bring it up for a specific reason: My sister has a blog. I have a blog. Neither of us have updated our blogs in a long time (with me being by far the worser perpetrator). In fact, the last time I talked with my sister about how I hadn't updated my blog in too long a time, she said "Why? Haven't you eaten any good food lately?" Like I said, my sister is cool. And funny.

Anyway, she just called me to say "Hey! I haven't updated my blog in a while and you haven't updated your blog in a while. Want to hang up, each write a blog entry, and then call each other back to talk about it?" It was an offer I couldn't refuse. And here I am.

This brings up a kind of poignant issue for me, which is my lack of motivation to write. And when I say "lack of motivation," I think that I mean "big tangled bundle of fears, worries, defeatist thoughts, and habitual avoidance." I'm not totally sure. I find it a difficult thing to think about, in a pretty literal sense. I was once asked, point blank, "What are you scared of that makes you not write?" And all I could offer was a tearful "I don't know." Trying to answer that question felt like trying to pin the tail on the donkey and not even being able to find the wall.

But I've been making myself think about it a lot more, lately, and those seem to be my basic roadblocks: fear, worries, defeatist thoughts, and the subsequent, habitual avoidance. In fact, all of them are habitual, and there's some comfort in the familiarity of that. Enough that when my sister called me to say "let's blog!" I felt a small panic: this would mean setting myself up for failure, again, when I feel I've already failed at blogging. What if I write this one post and then never again? What does that mean about me? Nothing good, I am sure. And on and on....

It's so hard to break that negative thought cycle and so easy to stay in safe habits. Easy except for that part of me that wants to write and isn't getting enough oxygen. So thank you, Tasia, for making me take a breath.