Stretching my vocal chords

As you can see, it's been a couple of years since I last wrote here. There's a good reason for that, that being that I've never actually liked or enjoyed writing. It comes out slowly, often painfully, occasionally agonizingly when I'm straining to put form to thoughts, emotions, and beliefs buried deep within my soul. It's not fun or easy for me and I don't like it.

That said, I've found to my chagrin that the very parts of writing that make it painful for me coincide remarkably with the value I gain out of it. Nothing else I attempt gives a concrete-ness to my thoughts, emotions, and beliefs like writing them down does. When I have a valuable thought and I don't write it down somewhere, somehow, it all too easily slips away from my consciousness and only resurfaces occasionally in fragments. Writing solidifies my learning process better than anything else I know.

I've barely written in the past five plus years.

You can imagine what that's done to my learning process. Everything I've learned over these past several years, most of them difficult, is deeply fragmented. This problem has compounded my capacity to read and absorb new information as well, to the point that for most of the past half-decade I've found myself unable to read anything constructive. I'd pick up a non-fiction book, read a few paragraphs, and have to put it down. I knew the information wasn't landing anywhere, so why read?

There were other things going on in these past seasons beyond just reading and writing issues, so the solution wasn't as simple as "just start writing again." But I might have solved it faster had I not had the problem backwards all this time. I thought I wasn't writing because I couldn't read, so there either wasn't anything I could write or I had to try to write EVERYTHING, and that was too daunting. Only recently have I realized that was backwards and I need to start by writing. So here I am. I'm starting...somewhere. There's no grand plan for how to sort through EVERYTHING (I've had plenty of schemes to that effect over the years). I do have a grand plan, one I'm excited about, but the purpose behind it is substantially different than the places I've gotten stuck at before. I'll explain more about that later.

For now, here I am again, writing, doing warm-up exercises for an internal voice that hasn't spoken above a whisper in years. If you'd like to hear that voice, subscribe and come along for the ride.