I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve started and abandoned a blog or other writing project.
Probably the most enduring of all my efforts was my photography blog for Memories by Michelle Photography which I kept going to varying degrees for more than a decade.
When I first started that blog, blogs were still cool. Social media was for pithy updates and people still clicked your links to read your more thoughtful, long-form posts. Over the years I saw that wane significantly. I, and all my friends who blogged, slowly abandoned our sites because of lack of engagement and moved to hosting all our content in Facebook posts and Instagram stories so people could consume it in immediate, bite-sized thought-chunks. Not that I was really into building a large audience or being validated by one but, if you’re sharing your writing at all, you’re doing so with the intent for people to read it and respond in some way. Otherwise, it’s just like speaking in an empty house: sometimes it’s cathartic but generally, it’s just plain unsatisfying.
Since then there have been writing courses and toying with poetry (not my strong suit) and quotes in shareable meme-like graphics, the odd longer post on Facebook that got some thumbs, and a Medium space that quickly sparked and just-as-quickly fizzled from lack of energy on both sides of the keyboard.
What that last effort did launch, however, was an adventure into playwriting. My writing gave a friend an idea for a monologue. She turned the monologue into a YouTube video which inspired another friend to suggest I write an entire play she could direct. 15 months later and that play has been on stage multiple times in the local area and even made it into a NYC festival which we attended last November. What an adventure! And all the more precious because it was an organic, spontaneous anomaly.
Will I write a play again? I don’t know. I feel like, in many ways, I had a thing to say and I said it. I didn’t ever intend to write a play and I don’t really intend to write another one but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try it again if I had something new to say. (Sometimes I think we - and I mean me - can try too hard to do a thing and we grip it to death until all the fun and energy are squeezed out of it. Yeah, I’m working on that).
Which brings me, via this long and meandering path that is often my thought process, into “The Messy Middle”.
It’s a theme that underscores so much of my creative efforts, what drives me to put something out into the world to see if it connects… resonates. My play, Out to Pasture, was just one expression of that: a middle-aged woman, slap-bang in the middle of all the things that call upon us in middle life, questioning herself, her life choices, her role in society, and even the face in the mirror. The play had no answers, tied no neat bows in its endings, but instead celebrated the joy to be found even amongst the mess.
As I have got older and life has piled on top of me (as life tends to do to all of us) I find that things are, generally, just messy. And when they’re not, they’re just a ball of string just waiting to get unraveled and rewound again. We come together and we fall apart. We know and then we unknow. We learn and then we have to relearn. It’s the way of life. And it’s where the interesting parts are for me: in that middle of the unraveled ball of string, sharing strategies and experiences with one another to detangle ourselves from whatever challenge is facing us and growing together in the process. The middle is where we create kinship in the unknown, and find joy in the uncovering and revealing of ourselves; vulnerability, intimacy, connection.
The messy middle is what I want to write about. It IS life. Answers and certainty are boring. Questions and exploration are mid-life turn-ons.
To quote the poet and novelist, Rilke…
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”
So, I’m going to explore the questions here in this new space, the messy middle of my heart and mind, and see where the words take me. Just as the title implies, there is no destination in mind, no real theme or purpose. I’m just going to try and commit to posting at least every other week.
Maybe you’ll join me in this exploration? If so, please click the Subscribe Now button at the bottom so we’re not relying on Meta’s Machiavellian algorithms.
And also because, yeah, it does make me happy to know someone is listening.
Quick shout out to my boss, Aaron Kardell, who recently started his own writing space here on SubStack and who inspired me to do the same by constantly reminding me that we shouldn’t wait until we know how to do something perfectly to begin. You can read and follow along on his space via the link on the right.