The Blogs of Wrath

 

An Ocean of Books by William Strang

        Many moons ago, I had a really successful book blog. I was getting paid for what I loved, reading books, and was even given opportunities to travel internationally because of it. It was grand! Then slowly I started suffering from a malaise that morphed into something much worse, a complete shutdown of everything in my life. If you’ve ever experienced a chronic mental illness, you may be able to relate. I went from gung-ho on so many aspects of life to barely being able to function. I kept reading as if my life depended on it, but everything else, like putting on pants, eating, or any of the basic necessities of life, made me feel like Sisyphus trying to get that boulder up the hill. So I stopped, everything, especially the blog.  

          This week we will be tasked with creating a blog on a more professional framework and I can’t help it feel an increased sense of dread. These simple posts for class have been painful enough and I’m still suffering from major writer’s block. Now I have to face a dilemma, do I start something new from scratch, which will do nothing to help the writer’s block, or do I try to go back in time and update and rework my old blog and therefore resurrect it?  This may sound like a simple thing and yet it is far from it. The old blog is tied, in my mind, to the trauma, unhealthy moods, and generally all of the crap that I tried to leave behind. I’ve been tossing this black cloud of a decision around in my head for a couple of weeks now and I still don’t know.  

        I feel as if I'm drowning in the ocean of the past.