It’s not that I’m not thinking about writing. I’m thinking plenty, and even writing some. I have three unfinished posts in my inbox. But, aside from the fact that I have no time whatsoever to put toward this blog right now, I’m also having some pretty serious identity issues.
To be honest, I am having something of an identity crisis. A murky kind I have never before experienced. I am accustomed to understanding my own self. I almost always can find words for my various emotional malaise; they might not come easy, but if I sit down earnestly, I can pick them out. This time around I am at a loss. People ask, ‘Are you glad to be home? Do you miss New Orleans? Do you feel torn?’ The truth is all of the above, and none of it, at the same time. It’s the none of it that troubles me.
It seems that the more I try to put words to my cloudy emotion, the more I undo the truth of it. Like explaining a dream. I am glad to be home. But is it still home when I am not the same person who left? I don’t feel out of place, it doesn’t feel wrong, or disappointing. I could say any of those things and they would be almost right, but completely wrong.
And thus, I am at an impasse. Both personally and writing-wise. Being the honest-to-death type, I cannot seem to just carry on as if everything is usual. Though a part of me would like to, I can’t just write about laundry and jam making and the disappointments of plugging my kids into the iPad so I can fillet 20 salmon.
Coupling with, not coincidentally, the identity confusion is a kind of ‘place disorientation.’ I am so incredibly tied psychologically to where I live that, even though I was coming home, this move has entirely thrown me. I don’t know where to stand, or who to be.
I just recently realized that this accounts for at least some of my absence here. I don’t know what to write. I feel like I have to reconstruct myself first, reconstruct this space and then begin anew. I might even have to re-open somewhere else. Start fresh.
This probably seems drastic to you. A good more than half the posts will still be the same– making bread, keeping house, growing a garden, raising ruffians, psychoanalyzing myself. But it’s all about context for me. I really cannot explain the profound difference in physical and psychological environment here. Or maybe what I cannot explain adequately is the profound effect that change has on me.
Either way, I love words because they help me to make sense of things, to unravel a few syllables at a time the tangly confusions that clog my mind. Apron Stringz gave me a place and a way to make sense of a few years of my life. This new phase might just take different words.
The idea of starting up a whole new blog is incredibly daunting to me right now. I don’t know when I might get the time for that sort of endeavor. Let alone that I need to sort myself out a bit more first. Our life is in all kinds of upheaval, not just the move, and I feel like it has to settle out some before I can hope to make any sense.
Will you wait for me?
calamity jane 
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