Occasionally, people ask me why I write. And it’s never been an easy question to answer.

The simplest explanation is that I write because I feel. It seems to me that the only way I can express the way I feel is to write it. And when I encounter “writers block,” it’s because I feel to much, or too little.

And at this moment in time, I do not know what I feel, and so words are beyond me. I read Dante and Emerson, Donne and Pope, and occasionally they touch me deep enough, reach the bottom of the well of feeling, that I can turn to someone and say “there, that’s what I feel, exactly, but I didn’t know how to put the words in that order.”

There are things I want to write, and things I want to talk about, but the word selude me. They refuse to be caught and put into any semblance of order. Like stars we can see but not touch, such is the feeling that runs through me. I can feel it, but I can’t say it. I can’t explain to you in any way what it feels like to be me.

Even these words above come hesitatingly, interspersed between a discussion of Frost and literary theory in my American Literature class.

Lately, there has been no flood of words, so common until recently, that I don’t know what to do with myself. Because I don’t know if it’s because am feeling too much. Or perhaps too little. But I do not know the difference, and it scares me.

So I’m forcing myself to keep these words coming, disjointed as they are. Because one day, I’ll be able to look back and finally figure out what this feeling is.

And it could possibly help if start keeping a real journal again, something I left off when I started blogging on a regular basis. Because I miss the sound of pen on paper, sprawled out across my bed trying so hard to meet my self-imposed quota, that I truly write whatever it is that comes across my mind.

Blogging, I sit and think about what I’ll write about, having a topic in mind, and trying to get a cohesive point across. Journaling, I write to write. I write to see the pen move across the page, and write the stream of consciousness that runs through me at that moment.

So blogging is not journaling, and over the last year I seem to have forgotten that. And I mean to get back to it.

And this is the most journal-like blog post I’ve ever written. I promise it won’t happen again. I just had to tell someone. Anyone.