Revamping Me...

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about my defunct blogs –Weesha’s World and Red Shoe Chronicles.  I remember being excited to be entering the blogging world.  I spent hours, days working on my blogs’ appearances.  I created schedules and started a topics list.  And I swore to myself both times that, “this time, it will happen”.  Then life got in the way and I stopped working, stopped writing.  

Several big and small things caused me to give up writing not just the blog but all creative writing.  The smaller reasons are easier to tackle.  I fell that if you want to do something you make the time for it.  Basically, I didn’t create the time to write.  I got lazy and put it off until I just didn’t bother anymore.  

There’s only one big reason I stopped writing.  I lost confidence in my ability to write.  You would think that earning a Masters of English in Creative Writing would have bolstered a person’s confidence, wouldn’t you?  Well, it did the opposite for me.  I have always had a difficult time with grammar, spelling, and punctuation.  I’m sure there’s going to be several typos in this post even after all the revising I do.  My difficulty stems from a combination of things that I didn’t realize I’d been dealing with all my life until I started see a new therapist.  Side note:  I truly love my therapist.  She forces me to keep my head up and my eyes open even when I’d rather stick my head in the sand.

 Anyway, through therapy, we realized that I more than likely have attention deficit disorder (ADD) which is widely seen as something that causes children (mainly boys) to run around screaming.  While this is a common behavior for some –girls as well as boys—with ADD and ADHD, there’s also the type that I have which is less disruptive to everyone around me but manages to rain such destruction down on me that the Mr. Mayhem would be impressed (insert pick of mayhem guy).  

Anyway, my form of ADD makes it difficult for me to concentrate.  And when I do manage to concentrate, I can become hyper-focused which means the place could be burning down around me and I wouldn’t notice.  Both states leave me exhausted, confused, and frazzled.  This meant that when I sat down to write I had difficulty constructing sentences that were grammatically correct with proper spelling and punctuation.  Revising helped but I never caught all my mistakes.  This wouldn’t  have been a big deal except my thesis depended on me ability to be as close to perfect as possible and I wasn’t.  While my thesis was accepted and I graduated, the feedback I received regarding my grammar was difficult to hear especially on repeat.  I’m not saying that it was unfair or uncalled for because it was true.  They were correct about my grammar and I harbor no ill will or hard feelings. 

I started spending an excessive amount of time focused on forming grammatically correct sentences and less time actually writing them down.  Until the thoughts and ideas in my head disappeared.  So, I stopped writing.

Four years ago, I applied and was accepted into the Clinical Rehabilitation Counseling program.  I was forced to start writing again.  Even if it was just academic papers, I was writing again.  And I started jotting down story ideas and wrote a few poems for shits ‘n giggles.  

I, also, started doing more research on self-esteem, body positivity, etc.  I started submitting proposals on Body Love/Body Positivity to conferences being held in my area and being accepted.  I started working with some amazing women on a summer writing workshop for teens.  And I rediscovered the pure joy of writing, fuck grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  Slowly, I gained my confidence back.

Now I’m back.  I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with this blog.  I thought about scraping both this one and Red Shoes.  In fact, I intended to figure out how to delete them both and create a new one.  But once I was logged in, I saw the old header and old background, and read some old blogs I’d posted I realized that while I have changed the core of who I am is still here.  I am still Weesha.  I’ve updated the look to reflect my current tastes but the content will still be what I intended six years ago – a cornucopia of thoughts and ideas to be read and enjoyed. 

So, buckle up everyone cause you’re in for a crazy ride.