I pull the knitted blanket on to my lap, and wait for Winnie to snuggle up beside me and get herself cozy. This is our morning routine Monday-Friday. The puppy sleeps, and I put pen to paper. The words flow easily. I am writing almost daily, yet I haven’t published on my Substack since October. Every single time I move from the couch to the computer, it is like my brain just stops working. I type long, run on sentences just to delete them minutes later. I stare at the blinking cursor, it's taunting me. The blank google doc loves to tell me I’m an imposter. Of course I haven’t posted on Substack, I’m not a good writer. I don’t have anything to say.
Except.
I do have a lot to say. My mind has been going non stop for weeks. I’m processing three pages worth of thoughts long hand, five days a week. I’ve been wrestling with the question: if I'm so easily able to write my Morning Pages, why can’t I craft even a sentence for Substack? The kicker, the wrestling has been taking place, in my morning pages.
A life lived, is a story lived. But just because the story is lived, doesn’t mean it's meant to be told to the world.
Currently, I’m living my life. I’m walking through the story. I’m documenting it because I know it is important. But I’m slowly realizing that not all important stories are public stories. Maybe one day, but also, maybe never.
What I do want to make public however is this second roll of film I got back this week. I’ve noticed that I tend to lean into one particular creative outlet at a time. Sometimes I’m writing multiple pieces a month, sometimes I am knitting six hats a month, and sometimes I pick up my camera multiple times a day in a month. This makes two rolls of film I’ve successfully loaded into my camera and wound up correctly to be scanned at our local film lab. The success of the actual images is subjective. I still have so much to learn, and so much I want to try. My favorite thing about film photography is the slowness of it. The fact that images of my kids in bathing suits exist on the same roll as images of them out in the snow feels special to me.
Beautiful! Love this quote "A life lived, is a story lived. But just because the story is lived, doesn’t mean it's meant to be told to the world."
Everything about this! 😍