I've been mulling over a number of things...

 
... such as...

Why do the last six blog entries I've written, or tried to write, remain in draft mode?

Why am I so reluctant to give up blogging altogether? It's not as if "my voice" is getting exercise here. I'm not interacting with peers here anymore. No unschooling conversations. Few writing conversations. Even my most faithful few readers are probably taking their morning coffee elsewhere these days.

These thoughts roll around in my head and I keep thinking about voice. Voice, as in style of presentation. The way one is perceived by others. I've lived my life alternating times of silence with times of being loud... or at least out there with a public face... people greeting me by name when I am out and about versus people not having a clue who I am.

I was on the radio this morning, a brief blip for the farmers market. It's not my favorite aspect of my work, but I think I do a passable job. I'm better with a script. Writing comes more naturally to me than speaking and I tend to loose track of the words that come out of my mouth. From my fingertips they are captured there on paper/on screen and I can move them around and mess with them until they sound like what I intended. Sometimes I wish I could see a written trail of my spoken words so that I could remember--review and refresh myself on meaning that my ears don't seem to process as well as my eyes.

A number of unschooling blogs that I have read faithfully for years are similarly quiet. One mother wrote about the transition from being the parent of young children to being a parent of teens. Maybe that's part of what is creating the gap between what I write and what I find myself willing to publish. My kids have their own voices and I'm not sure their stories should be mine to tell anymore.

Many of my favorite writers do still write frequently. I find myself envious of their energy almost as often as I am inspired by it. I'm not sure what that says about my writing life right now. That I'm impatient, perhaps. That I have filled my life, for the moment, with too many distractions and that writing--at least in terms of creative effort that results in something large and tangible and... printed... needs to spend some time in the back-seat.

My head is so full of things to care about, to be passionate about, to make me a more involved member of my community. I review my unpublished drafts and see many topics spilling out through my fingertips. I've been here before. Spitting out thoughts and fragments that seem so unwieldy and lacking in cohesion that chaos reigns.

It's a sanity-preserving mechanism, I suppose. Capturing thoughts on paper/keyboard as a pressure relief with the hope/expectation that one day I can sort through them and make sense of where my mind has been.