While my brother was here for Christmas we talked about blogging and writing in general. Being an English teacher, he has some insights on the subject. One observation he made was that if you write a truly good work of fiction you are almost embarrassed to show it to those close to you for fear that they will see themselves reflected in it and be unhappy with your portrayal of them. Although I have written very little fiction in my life, I got what he was trying to say and it has factored into a sort of internal dialog I’ve been wrestling with for the last week or so, though I’ve only just really realized it.

In the course of our conversation I told him that the last several posts here were written more from the head than the heart. I’d written them without any real inspiration and I felt that it showed in the writing. What I didn’t stop and consider at the time was why I’d written them at all if that was the case. I told him, and had been telling myself, that I wrote them just to have something to post, and I believed that to be true at the time. While that may be a small part of it I’ve come to realize that it is only a very small part. I think it would be closer to the truth to say that I wrote them because I was looking for inspiration. I enjoy writing when I feel like doing it and, over the last month or so, I’ve been writing more than I have in years.

I’ve been dwelling on the subject lately because I’ve felt completely uninspired to write anything. I look at my list of draft ideas and nothing strikes me as even remotely interesting. I don’t feel any of it. It may as well be a list of assigned topics handed out by a teacher, not ideas that I felt would interest me enough to have made note of them. Ironically, the last post I wrote that I really ‘felt’ was one I ultimately decided not to post at all because it ended up feeling too personal. Only one person besides me has read it. Beyond that, I’ve just not had my heart in it.

I think the problem, at least in part, is that I’ve been very busy between some things I have to complete for work and the holiday rush. The other part is the sort of mild depression that seem to always settle in as Christmas draws to a close. Well, depression may not be the right way to describe it. Now that I think about it I guess I don’t really know how to describe how I feel. Melancholy? Pensive? Dispirited? Somber? I don’t know. I think all of those touch on what I feel, but none quite capture it exactly. It is just a sort of ‘blah’ feeling. I suppose it is really just a sort of listlessness that comes after any big event. You spend weeks or months running around like crazy getting ready and that sort of becomes your purpose in life. Once it is over your compass needle just needs time to settle.

And then there is an issue I’m faced with that is unrelated to the holidays at all.  Nothing I want to go into here in any detail, just something that I never expected any issues with that has turned out to be far more complex than I ever imagined it would be. The problem has left me a little bummed out and that distraction is just one more log on the fire. All of it together has me somewhat distracted and completely uninspired. Unfortunately, that lack of inspiration is a big deal for me because I am simply not able to write about topics I don’t have any feeling about which, at the moment, includes almost everything. That same lack of inspiration has even more impact on the types of things I’ve written here in large part because I tend to write things here that I wouldn’t normally write or say otherwise.

If you don’t know me and just happened upon my blog, what may not be immediately evident is that I am normally a very private person. I am very outgoing and sociable in general, but there are very few people in my life I let close enough to me to see many of the things I’ve written about here. Having some stranger from Des Moines read my private thoughts doesn’t bother me at all; I don’t know them nor they me, and I have no reason to care about what they come away thinking about me. What I fear most is that people who know me will end up reading them. I often reveal far more of myself here than I intend to and, quite frequently, I don’t realize it until I go back and re-read a post some time later.

When Dave said what he did about not letting people close to you see your work it didn’t immediately click that it had any application in my world because we were talking specifically about fiction, but I realized tonight that the same could be said for what I’ve been writing here. I think that same embarrassment he mentioned where works of fiction are concerned holds true for works of non-fiction in some cases and for similar reasons. You are embarrassed to show it to people you know not for fear that they will see something of themselves in it, but that they will see something of you in it and whatever they see will change or lessen their opinion of you.

Everyone compartmentalizes themselves to varying degrees, allowing only certain people into those different compartments. In the information security world there is a term for that concept: zones of trust. Different systems and different users belong to certain “zones of trust” and access to those zones should be closely controlled. No user should be able to access information from a system in a zone of trust they don’t have rights to. I’d never really thought about it before now but that concept, right down to the choice of language, maps very well to life in general. The problem is that blogs don’t have any facility for parsing posts up in that fashion so, if you choose to blog at all, you can choose to either not put anything out there that is inside any but the most casual zone of trust or you can choose to put it all out there for anyone to see. As I said before, I am closer to the latter than the former.

So here I sit, completely uninspired and unsure what I want to write about or even if I want to write. I dunno. I suppose a little time will let the post-holiday blues burn off. I hope the unexpected issue will resolve itself sooner rather than later too. In the mean time, I will probably not have much to say here; at least not much of substance. So bear with me while I gather my thoughts. Hopefully the new year will bring with it just a touch of inspiration.

/g