This is going to be one of those posts where I just start writing in order to figure out what I’m going to write about. Which, dear writerly friends, is a very good way to start writing. Just write something. Anything. You’ll get where you need to go in just a little while.

October has been and continues to be insane: I have been preparing for six workshops and have facilitated four so far.  And I haven’t been writing, either in my journal or more formally. But I miss writing. I love writing. I need writing. I wrote on my Facebook and Twitter status that I feel disconnected when I haven’t been writing. Others agreed and also described feeling Uncentered and Grief-struck. What is it about writing that provokes such emotion? Such attachment?

For me writing is my true voice. It is the expression of my true self. Which is why after an arid writing period I begin to feel disconnected from my self. I don’t know another way to describe it, it just feels as if I am drifting through my days, not wholly taking part in each moment. I lose track of feelings. Even my dreams of late have been chaotic, frantic, and immediately forgotten upon waking. I’ve lost touch with my what makes me, well, me.

Today, thanks to an “assignment” given by a newspaper editor at the writers’ conference at which I presented this past Saturday, I had the push I needed to put fingers to keys. It was a short piece and not the kind of thing I usually write, but I loved punching out words and sentences, pushing them around until they clicked together exactly as I wanted. It was also the first day we had a fire – and what writer doesn’t envision themselves writing by a fire? It was a good day. Deadline met, fingers hungry for more word-punching. Hungry for self-connection.

At my workshop yesterday, we had a discussion about how we all have the self-sabotaging tendency to do exactly not the things we love. Why do we avoid the things that being us joy? Why are we always too busy, too “I’ve got to do this first,” too tired, too… ? Do we like being unhappy? Uncentered? Grief-struck?

Personally, I don’t.

Prompt: Write a list of the things that bring you joy. Are you doing any of them? Why not? Do one now.

(I must credit my dear friend and colleague, Sue – whose birthday it happens to be today – for that prompt and question, which she often puts to her own clients.)