How do I know when it’s time for a blog post? I get restless and irritable. I feel pain on my insides. Like my soul hurts. It’s been 4 months since my last post and that is unacceptable. After being ignored for too long, my creative mind throws a temper tantrum and gives me the silent treatment. I torture myself further by reading everything I can about making time for your passion, choosing creativity over fear, living your best life, bla, bla, bla. Anything to avoid writing, which is in fact my passion. I have yet to understand how I can love something and hate it at the same time. When I don’t write, I experience creative blue balls. I feel tightly wound and the pressure of my creativity builds and builds, desperate to get out, to give birth to my thoughts, opinions and stories. I realize the process of writing requires foreplay. I must nurture myself, and feel loved. I have to feel safe and protected and cherished. I have to woo the words out of myself. And once I get myself to the place of a completed piece, I feel a release, a high, a sense of contentment, a creative orgasm.  Ahhhhh!

I’m such a cliché. When I went back to work, I told myself, “you have to keep writing! You have to make time!” And some small part of me believed I could. But what happened, is what always happens. I got caught up in my every day routines, monotony, minutia, leaving no time for myself or my passion. It’s almost as if subconsciously I created busy work in order to avoid that which scares me, which is, what would happen if I gave my writing the attention and devotion it requires and deserves? What if I actually found happiness there?

I recently discovered (with the help of my therapist and a really good friend) that I thrive in chaos. So I invent it, then manage it in order to feel successful. This is why I constantly struggle, between doing what I need to do and doing what I want to do. But perhaps I have to stop experiencing my writing as a want and instead as a need. Writing is not a luxury, something to do in my spare time, when the stars are aligned and the kids are safely asleep and there are no dishes in the sink. Writing is a necessity for me, as evidenced by this dull ache I have when I don’t honor my creative spirit. Just expressing it now, I feel better already.