I feel a little like Beyonce. I’m dropping a blogpost after months of silence. And I haven’t told anyone.

In case you were looking for me:
I stopped writing because I was looking for me, too. I hoped that the new year would provide me with some insight about where to take my writing next. People kept telling me I needed to do something with my blog. That I needed to dig a hole and find my niche. That I needed to be an expert in something for people to expect my blog every day. So, I drafted a few ideas. I started to prepare myself for OpEd Tuesdays and Poetry Wednesdays, and to essentially deliver a product that people could swallow without chewing. But I never got far enough to actually start posting with my new format in mind. Maybe something in a deep cranial fold of logic or the stained glass transparency of my heart knew I would never be able to fully commit to a project that did not feel organic or alive to me. Or maybe I was lazy. Probably, I was lazy.

Along the way, I found that life has a way of carving you a tunnel where there was not a path before, and the fact that there is an entire world outside of that tunnel is not enough to convince you that the tunnel is worth leaving. Well, that, and I got a job (that I love) that I needed to get acclimated to before I could continue writing. But now I’m here. And hopefully, you are, too.

In case you were not looking for me:
If you are new here, welcome. Please pretend as if I have been a diligent blogger this entire time and that I have been dedicated to the pursuit of savory word choice and hilarious musings. I’m sure we will get along just fine if you can play pretend as well as I can.

The Pale White Lies
But in reality, this blog was a gigantic lie that I used to tell myself. In case you didn’t know, this blog is updated every day (except on the weekends), and I do not usually premeditate my topics. I generally sit down to write in the twilight of my day and slip into my writing like the sun sinks behind the horizon. Yet, recently, I would watch dusk turn into dawn without so much as a turn of phrase to show for it.

For some time, I researched other blogs and platforms to get a sense of what I would want for BaileyDailey in the future. I called this progress, and finally, I called my own bluff. I lived painfully with the lie that, yes, oh yes, today was the day, only to pull the covers on my bed up to my chin at its close and chide myself for another wasted day. I decided, very unceremoniously, that I was not good enough to be a writer, and I drowned any notion of writing. But after a month or so without writing, all I wanted to do was throw myself overboard.

Writing, if it is a part of your life in terms of habit or talent, is not a tumor to be separated from flesh and precious organ. It is more of an urge that is as familiar as a headache or a hunger pang. It presses in until you can let it out. And try telling your shoulders to fall to their normal height or your mind to mind the speed limit as it goes racing and tumbling down every turn in a piece or prose or poetry, waiting to be cradled and cast out by a line or chapter break. And try telling yourself that you can read something without imagining how you would craft that line or imagine that character’s faults for yourself. And try telling yourself that reading other people’s works, while not creating your own, will satiate you for the rest of your life.

And words, words, words. They line my soul and march through me and they stay unyielding in their pregnant forms so turgid with meaning and incorrect use but also flexibility in a way no one has ever caressed them before and I’ve lost all control. of. punctuation. There.

And these are the lies I would tell myself. That I was not good enough, and that I shouldn’t be writing, and that I didn’t have enough passion to continue.

But I told a bigger lie. I told myself that I could live without writing. And now that I am back to blogging, it’s not that I will start to tell the truth. It’s never been about that. It’s always been about spinning gold threads in reality and churning it with half-truths, lies, and perception. (And if you don’t think that perception should be in that grouping, then you must come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.)

And with that, BaileyDailey is back.

And with that, so am I.