My writing here (and everywhere, honestly) has been sporadic at best, and usually whatever is worst.

The last (counts on fingers, runs out, gives up) at least 10 years of my life have been hard. I’ve given birth, left churches, gone back to school, gotten my first job, gotten fired, gotten divorced, lost my mom to a grueling fight with cancer. I’ve dealt with chronic health issues and new diagnoses. I’ve moved across the country. I’ve spent seven years steadily working through more issues than National Geographic with my faithful, patient therapist.

And through it all, I wanted to write – to be creative – and found it so hard to do so. I had nothing to say, I told myself. And I had no time.

Except that I had everything to say and could easily have set aside time to write. So what was stopping me?

I’ve felt, recently, whenever I took up pen or paintbrush or laptop, that if I opened the floodgates even an inch I would drown in my own thoughts, so powerful and choking would be the rush of everything trying to come out at once. And yet, hard as I tried, I couldn’t find relief in writing. I couldn’t even get a trickle of inspiration.

So I took some time and went exploring in my mind, and this is what I found:

I wasn’t actually trying to get things out. I was trying to keep them in.

I wanted to write, but I wanted to whip things up and dash them out without delving into the ugly mass that is my soul.

All the ideas and feelings and images I wanted to get out because they were pretty and light were rooted in this smelly, sticky, oozing, filthy root ball of all the fear and trauma and pain I try to keep hidden away. I couldn’t pull out a clever turn of phrase without this entire chunk of ugly trying to follow it.

Nobody wants the ugly, okay? I don’t even want the ugly.

I grew it and it happens to be a pretty important part of what made me the person I am today, and I like that person a lot.

But I don’t like the ugly, and I have always seen no reason why anyone else should have to deal with it.

I am starting to think, though, that I can only get the good and beautiful out into the open if I’m willing to share what it is rooted in.

So I’m going to be writing here because I have to write or I will explode.

Since I can’t separate them, I’ll be writing the good, the bad and the ugly, all in one big slimy mess.

If you’d rather not read all of that then sweetly take yourself elsewhere. It’s a free internet out there. Here is where I’m writing.