5/12/2011 - the helpless hiatus. . .

This was technically written yesterday (with a few revisions made this morning), even though nothing came up on the site.  It wasn't my fault; Blogger experienced a day-long outage and went into read-only mode.  Still, I feel like I have failed in some way.  I even finished this post in a Word document so that I could just copy and paste it into Blogger when it came back up (which it never did), so I technically am still on track for my daily writing goal, but that doesn't alleviate the faint disappointment I feel that a day went by and nothing new showed up on the blog.

Not that, in the scheme of things, it really matters very much.

The truth is, the act of writing throughout this past week has been a very trying experience, a daily struggle where just last week or the week before, I thought maybe I had hit a stride of some kind.  Ideas for posts came readily, the execution relatively painless.  Seeing as how I am now officially a third of the way to the end of the year, this ease I felt with writing was an encouraging sign for the next 240 posts.

But then Sunday rolled around, Mother's Day, and I thought I would write something really sweet about my mom, as there are many sweet things to write.  But I sat on the couch, faced a blank pad of paper, and completely shut down.  Everything I wrote felt maudlin, melodramatic, and, worst of all, clichéd; my mother routinely defies cliché.  The week continued down the same path, my writer's block intensifying.  I actually considered taking a break, resting for a few days to recharge my energies and ignite some creativity.  Not that it matters much with my miniscule readership and general lack of a goal for this project.  Besides, nobody could fault me for wanting to take some time off after four and a half months of daily writing, right?

But, strangely enough, it was exactly this amount I have already accomplished that deterred me from exercising this break.  Like an addict with 132 sober days behind him, I didn't really want to have it all end with a hiatus that likely was more indulgent than necessary.

But then yesterday happened, with the error message that Blogger was unavailable; apologies for the interruption in service.  All I wanted to do after refreshing the screen several times was lock myself in the closet, sit at my desk and write for as long as possible, bring back by sheer force of will all my creativity, my drive, the steady flow of words that once did inhabit my writing process.  It was one thing for me to decide I wanted a break, but another to have the break forced upon me.

When the site finally came up this morning, I treated it as a reunion between friends.  Did I fail in my commitments because of yesterday?  No, definitely not, I recognize that, especially since I still spent time writing (and about gratitude, no less).  And it even brought me to some insight, I think; the "service interruption" made me realize that for me, writing almost doesn't even count anymore unless there is a possibility that someone might read it.

I try not to think too much about that, or about the future of this blog as a whole.  When I do, the pressure gives me a sense of vertigo.  So I try as best I can to work with a one-day-at-a-time philosophy, but I can't help but sometimes give in and muse about what it would feel like to be a writer in that professional sense, where I don't have to fit this into the lunch hour of my day job or cram it into the already-too-short hours of my evenings, where service interruptions to Blogger wouldn't matter because I'd have a much more visible platform.  And where I would know with certainty that people are reading and paying attention to me, less as a person, and more as a writer.

But that's for later.  For now, I'm just glad to have my Blogger back.  And were it not for yesterday's outage, I would not have found this renewed motivation to try harder, write harder, and appreciate the fact that I can do so.  Were it not for yesterday and the helpless hiatus I found myself on, I would not have found this sense of gratitude for the very vehicle in which I am writing about gratitude.