Second best
I used to write. I mean, more than blog posts, things I throw together and don’t edit (quite deliberately: that would be writing), more than an occasional comment at other blogs. (Also, though, stuff with fewer readers. How these things go.) I wrote a lot, some good, most of it not very. I kept journals, very regularly.
I stopped, about 8 years ago. All of it, down even to the journals. Oh, I wrote some; I used to keep something at Opendiary (about 6 years ago) and for quite a while, I was a regular poster on a few usenet groups. But those were more like blogging than writing, though not exactly. (I still have copies of all of these things, though I never read them. It was — well, if you think I sound depressed *now*.) But it is most accurate to say that I stopped writing 8 years ago.
(This has come up in two conversations recently, with different people, though not unrelated conversations. To some extent they both know why, though I am not sure what extent, really.)
I used to think I’d be a writer, in some way. Blogging is more publishing than I would likely ever have had (I mean, I was not that good: lots of people write), but it’s not writing, and sometimes I feel regret for having thrown away something I wanted so badly. Once.
And yet — do I still want it? I don’t know. Enough, I guess, to keep me blogging. Enough to feel twinges of regret when my buried ambition occasionally resurfaces. Not enough to do it.
But I am lying now. Lying because I do not, will not, say why I stopped, not here. I was not that wonderful a writer, and though I suppose there’s always time, and though in a way blogging is great practice, I suspect I will continue to not write. Ideas are scarce. They weren’t, before, but they are now. I look at a blank page and have nothing to say to it: it feels me with horror, despair. I do not try this anymore.
The reasons why are complicated, and not really sensible, though of course they wouldn’t be.
So I blog, and try very hard to write daily, even if it’s something small and silly, and this is writing, I say, this counts. And it does in a way; I enjoy it; it’s incredibly satisfying. But also it doesn’t.