When I last posted in September 2022, I had no plans to quit this space. I don’t have a good story to tell about why I stopped. I wasn’t kidnapped. I didn’t suffer traumatic brain injury and forget my URL. And if I had forgotten, I still had the annual renewal bills to remind me.

I never meant to go silent. I just lost track of what I meant to do with this space. I knew I wanted my posts to feel like more than just feeding words into the hungry maw of large language training models. I didn’t want to feel myself become a ChatGPT vassal.

I stopped writing in the usual way and took some time, intentional or no, to relearn my own mind. I’ve been working a lot with the idea of community. As in: Who even am I? Who are my people? What do I need to say?

Having the need to say things is not the same as having things that need to be said.

Somehow in the last ten years of social media, the mere act of saying things became confused with the work of doing things, knowing things and feeling things. Simply saying things is a low bar. I am trying to become a person who says and knows less; who feels and does more.

I have been writing. A cycle of poetry workshops at the public library in late 2022/early 2023 put me back in touch with poems, and I started cultivating a practice. I have been fitting poems into the spaces of life where Facebook and Twitter used to go. I have been compiling a collection of other people’s excellent poems so I can make a study of how they work, how they move. The library workshops put me into community with a few new friends and we meet together monthly to explore our craft. This gives a sense of accountability missing since undergraduate writing classes. Better actually, since the four of us are all writing from similar places in life with wildly different voices. They care about what I have to say. I care about what they have to say. We share critique to help each other say it better.

I had shoulder surgery in October. There was nothing to do while waiting for muscle and tendon to reattach to bone, but sit, read, watch and listen. I read 17 books in 59 days. I finished two shows I had previously started but never finished (The Leftovers and The Mandalorian) and then watched the entire first season of The Last of Us in pretty much one go. I got to work curating my Spotify playlists, journaled a bit, tagged pictures in my photo roll and wrote poems.

Pondering, all the while, my wild privilege to have good healthcare, paid time off to safely recover and the luxury of time to rest.

My shoulder has healed well enough to begin a slow return to work and the other activities of life. I’m off the couch, out of the sling and doing most of the things I need to do. I’m also feeling fullness, the benefit of the time spent reading, watching and listening. There is a happy heaviness to it, a sense of richness. Which has me thinking of my writing here as a work of digestion, a way of making use of things I take in. This, I think, has been the purpose of the blog all along. A place to metabolize and try to make sense in community with others.