The reason why I write

Writing has always been my therapy... and much more effective that the child psychologist my father took me to see at 13 and the clinical psychologist I saw when I was depressed in the Island Behind God's Back.

This blog was created to help me find my voice back in 2006. I always knew I had something to say, I just didn't know what it was or how it would come out. As I grew, my writing grew more open. I wrote less in parables and turned down the volume on self editing. I realized that there was a correlation between key stroke and heart that the mind had no place in interfering especially one like mine that was so hung up on appearances and appropriateness and all those things we are taught that make people dignified.

I just started to write. I stopped thinking and I just let the words pour out of my heart and I shared them here.

I haven't advertised this blog. It is semi-anonymous. I write with a pseudonym so that the mind doesn't get too threatened in all this open heart conversation.

I know that it may come across as a little out there sometimes... and sometimes I hide behind what appears to be a flair for the dramatic, but essentially, this is me. This is the me that I am revealing to myself and I am letting you in on it as it happens. When you read my blog, you are witnessing my life, and consciousness as it unfolds.

This blog is my stream of consciousness. My posts are not pre-planned... they just flow. I start a post not really knowing how it is going to end. This is indeed my loose interior monologue This is why my writing has been so therapeutic. I write not only to share, but to reveal to myself.

Over the past year, as I came to terms with being a newlywed, I found that I had very little to say. My writing was more expository than exploratory. I wrote to keep you up to date, to tell you I was alive, but few were the moments when I would just lit my heart rip. Funny enough, the same thing that seemingly silenced me, is the very thing that is giving me back my voice.

Marriage for me has been a journey into self. I thought it was the journey of two people trying to walk together but it is way more than that. It is about getting into you and then walking together with souls bare towards the light.

I have never been more myself in any relationship and I don't think I have been more myself even when I wasn't in a relationship. It's like I am finding out more about who I really am as i find out about my life partner. It is a blessing... he seems to hold up a mirror to me and I to him. We help each other see ourselves.

We have spent more conversation hours in this one year than I may have for all of my previous relationships combined and of course, we almost never talk about the weather.

As I continue to grow and my voice continues to gain strength, no doubt my writing will reflect this. I will not write for shock value, but I will write as my heart wishes to express. For me, it isn't what comes out of my mouth that reveals my heart, it is what comes from my pen.

The sky is about to fall: the prologue

I got married eight months ago today. I remembered just now at 8:52 pm when I glimpsed on the date for the umpteenth time for the day. I am more concerned about not missing my youngest sibling's B-Day than remembering my monthly "anniversary." We did it for the first five months. ESC would write me these cute notes, which then tapered down into SMSes and just fizzled out altogether. I have to keep track of bill payments and whether we are running low on toothpaste and milk and clean socks. Who has time for another reminder?

I think I have Married People's Writer's Block. I came up with the term in my usual self-diagnosis. How else can I describe the fact that I just feel I have been self-editing ever since I got married? (Maybe that is exactly the problem: "Writers block caused by self-imposed self-editing resulting in chronic constipation and blockage of energy and writing channels")

It's weird. I just seem to not have much to say. I look back on some of my older posts and I marvel at the writer I once was. Now, I feel like I write about the arcane and mundane and my entire existence has become so much less than sensational. Yeah right, who am I fooling about being slightly mysterious? Ha!

But when did this blog become mindless recounts of days spent as opposed to something much more meaningful? This is not a "Today I walked a mile in red hooker heels" kind of blog. It's a "Hooker heels were made for a gal like me." The difference? One statement is descriptive, the other, narrative.

I like to tell stories, not just facts. It's just that I am coming up dry these days. Maybe it's time to switch expression media and delve into photography. Whatever it is, I just need to get my shit together because I am the writer of a Twentysomething blog about to turn 30 in less than two months and I better find my voice and say something meaningful soon because in case you haven't already noticed, the sky is predicted to fall on August 9!

Communicating through writing

It is a joy of magnanimous proportions for someone to visit my blog and say:

"Hi! Was curious to see who was actually following my blog so I got here. But now I'm just honoured! I love your blog, it's a fabulous read. You write really well. I can identify with this post so much. I'm exactly like you in this respect. In fact, I used to be painfully shy as a kid and people who know me now find that hard to believe. I do love my time with myself but I agree with you when you say "...I am too curious about life and people to be permanently withdrawn."

or

" 'Mostly to observe and maybe to partake, but still observing through participation.' - that could be me talking."

Eespeciallly when those two persons are writers of blogs that I myself like, and whom I have never met. The first person is the writer of the blog The Cloudclutter Chronicles, an Indian writer, based in Bombay (now Mumbai for the rest of the Non-Indian world). You need to see for yourself why I am such a fan of hers.

The second person is the UK Based author of blog Razor-Blade Life, who is amused by Jamaican expressions and idioms, and writes about her family life. I met her through another blog on which I made a comment, and she thought I was a "he" and the rest is lost in funny gender obscured history. I follow her blog too. She doenst even know that her Bolognaise and Carbonara post made me cook thin spaghetti with meatballs in a rich tomato sauce.

I also have to mention commentator Michelle Frost, Scotland-based writer of Crows Feet and brand spanking new author of First Light, who articulates so well, the struggle of being true to who you are. I follow both her personal blog and that dedicated to her new book. Michelle, I will read that book as soon as I can get it shipped to me on this Island Behind God's Back!

So I am meeting my fellow man (or woman) through blogsphere. Not a bad place for like minds to "link up." For so long this bog has been a secret shared only with close friends and family... it's good to share it now with others.

I hear that stats show that most blogs are wirtten by well-educated people who often have another source of income and happen to be men. I disagree. It could just be that I have always unknowingly had a thing for women writers (even though there is a space reserved for the Derek Walcotts and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's of the world). Women just feel more and write in a way in which you actively share that experience. So yes, I have been consumed by the profundity of good male writers, but they have never made me cry.

A woman's lot is a unique existence that only other women or their very feminine, sensitive and sometimes gay male friends can appreciate. As we say in Jamaica "Woman luck deh a dungle heap and fowl come pluck it out." It means that we have been given shit luck as women sometimes, just the remnants of things that men don't want, and on top of it, the chickens rummage through the garbage to take away what little we have been given.

That does not say that we are any lesser of the sexes, but that we have a unique burden to bear. Every woman can identify with this. The burden of nurture and nature...and sometimes, societies and families that impose one more than the other.

But we transcend cultural and parachial borders, the plural experience of womanhood. And as writers and lovers of the arts, we find common ground that dumb separatist people cannot identify with in their advanced stages of myopia.

So, thank you for coming. Thank you for sharing. My heart is full.

Customizing blogs for dummies

That ought to be the name of a book. Funny thing is that I dont believe that books can help dummies. If so, they wouldn't be dumb in the first place.

But fiddling and tinkering will make a Steve Jobs out of the simplest nerd...or so we hope. As you can see... I am making some headway.

You now have the ability to share any post on your facebook, delicous, twitter... and all the damn social networking sites that I am too old to keep up with. Can you believe that my brother mentioned "facebook" for the first time to me in 2007? Well I had gotten loads of invitations but I was already on Hi5 so I had no interest in joining yet another social networking site...especially since Hi5 had descended into the pit of a desperate sleazy hell.

But...I digress. I do that a lot. My mind just needs a smidgen to get going on a tangent. Always has been this way. Here I go again.

I dont have a techy boyfriend to hide behind anymore so I damn well have to figure out crap on my own... its kinda fun to solve these seemingly big puzzles, until you realise that it was just another useless task, contributing nothing to the fight against world hunger.

But I think that the bugs I have been having with Analytics has something to do with Firefox... will explore.