Digging in the Archives of My Randomness........

Part One....
I read a blog here this morning about November being National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short.  So the challenge is to write a little everyday and then by the end of November we will have a finished book and all be best selling novelists by Christmas. Well maybe not all of us, but if you are an avid reader like I am then you know that sometimes talent doesn’t seem to have anything to do with success. I do not know if I will be able to accept this challenge, but I figure that I will give it a go.
Okay, the idea is to write some everyday. While I do think that writing is a great exercise as well as a great source of communication I am not always the best at it. I see writing as a very personal way of expressing ourselves at the deepest levels and since I am not someone who is very comfortable at divulging my inner feelings I seem to maintain a natural writer’s block. If, however, my writing is not of a personal nature but of a factual nature then I seem to find it easy for the words to flow from thoughts to what you see on “paper”.
I thought for a long time that I was not capable of writing anything worth reading, but I had the fortunate blessing of a very special person entering my life for a short time. Through many long conversations about our different cultures, different religions, different experiences and different histories, my respect for him grew to a level I had never experienced before with another person. With him I could totally be myself, I didn’t not have to worry about his perception of me. I wasn’t too smart, I didn’t know too much, I wasn’t too curious, I didn’t talk too much, it was a really amazing experience. I cherish every minute of it and there are moments still that I miss it painfully.
Since he walked outta my life there has been no one else that has come close to being the confidant that he was. There is no one else with whom I so relish engaging. There is no one else that I so hungrily devour every moment with. There is no one else that I so desire to speak to, whose voice I so long to hear, whose opinion I treasure so much. There is, without a doubt, no one else that I miss so terribly. There is no one else who has walked into my life for such a short time and left such a wonderful footprint.
And this — this is his legacy!
Every word that I struggle to place perfectly, every thought that I pain over expressing effectively, every single keystroke is his legacy to me. For he was the one that told me I should write. Ironically, he told me that I should write a book. I have not, as yet, found the courage to try something so grand as writing a book, however, how could I refuse him his request completely. So I blog; at least I used to. And I think, at least in my deluded mind, that I was getting pretty good at it. And then I hit a personal rough spot and stopped writing.
When that happened, when I put my pen down the strangest thing happened. I felt like a part of me had been ripped away, like I had lost a limb or one of my senses. How could I miss something that I had never thought me much good at anyway?  Why did I miss something that I didn’t think natural for me? What had happened in the course of the months that I had been writing? Had I actually developed a fondness for writing? Was writing not merely an exercise but maybe a recreation? Did I actually need to write?
So after a move that took me 3 states away, back close to my hometown and somewhere that I really didn’t want to be. After getting settled in and trying to regroup and regain some real life again, I decided that writing would help, that it would be like therapy for me. But I had been away so long that I was struggling. I could not focus, I felt no sense of accomplishment. The completed articles seemed lacking, deluded, boring.
I had always chosen my subjects based on what grabbed my attention, what headline or sound-bite had reached our and flipped my switch. So while most of my articles could be considered of military or international interest, I have thrown in some random rants about other things and once or twice I have even touched on the personal. But even when I found a headline or sound-bite that bit, nothing just seemed to hold me long enough for me to put some meat on it. So as the primaries were getting primed, I was getting discouraged. In January, I quit. I decided that personal issues had maybe taken too much of a toll on me. That maybe I would never get back what little success I had enjoyed. Could it be that I might never recover that maybe I had truly lost everything?
I guess we will see this month.