Purple Violets

I watched a movie this weekend called Purple Violets. In it a women (played by Selma Blair) finds herself in her thirties in an unhappy marriage, doing a job she doesn't love, and not doing the thing she wanted to do in the first place: write. When her old love from college asked her why she stopped writing, confessing, he was always jealous of her writing skills, she responds, "I guess I loss my confidence."

Hm.

I love to write. I used to write all the time. I would find myself taking notes in class, and in the margins, squeezing in poems or starting short stories. When I was in high school, instead of writing notes to one of my best friends, Mollie, I'd just write her short stories. And Olivia and I would spend hours on the phone making up stories and telling them to each other. All on the fly.

And now, I just...I get this anxious feeling whenever I try to write for real. My creativity feels blocked. And it feels too hard to do the unblocking. To write about the things I haven't been writing about until it's all out there. Anymore, my own stories, my own voice, has lost its confidence.

But, no more excuses. This is the year of living slow enough to hear the whispers. That voice of mine may be choked, but it ain't dead.

I have a plan. And it will start tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes.