Over ten years ago, in the earliest days of blogging, I had an online journal. It was not an actual blog, as it did not contain links to other pages/sites, but an old-fashioned journal in a new-fangled mode: the internet. I don't believe there were any easy templates for this type of communication back then, and even if there were, I was so new to computers I'm sure I wouldn't have known how to find or use them. I invested great time and energy on my narratives, which I sent via email to a tech-savvy friend to post for me. It was cathartic and exhilarating to publish anonymously what I felt I could not reveal to the world in my "real life." Looking back, it would be easy to cast us as exhibitionist (me) and voyeur (him), but in fact, it was a relationship based on respect and trust. I cannot thank him enough for taking time out of his own busy workday for all those many months to design and maintain a website devoted to allowing me that unique opportunity for artistic expression.
I wrote fairly faithfully for a couple of years or so, then Hurricane Katrina struck and sort of turned life upside down. Of course, I was in good company--lots of folks were displaced, relocated, suffered great loss of life, personal possessions, spirit. And now many of those same people have picked up the pieces, started over, moved on. I relocated, attempted to start over, but inside, I haven't moved on. Not from Katrina, not from loss and trauma that goes a long way back, I now realize. Writing would have been a reasonable Rx for the depression I was going through following Katrina, but I was simply not up to the task in the wake of so many new obstacles. This new blog is my attempt to record and make sense of a profound loss of spirit, which I hope to regain. It is also to rekindle the spark I once had for artistic expression through the written word. So the Get Well wish is for myself--and for whomever else is in need of it.
