In which I senselessly roam all over the place

A couple of hours ago, a lovely friend retweeted the following:

Everytime I hear "I don't have time to blog" I want to smack them. Time shouldn't be the key. Passion should be.

And you know, 70 levels of word. If you're just churning out something for the sake of churning it out, not only does it become work, it becomes essentially unreadable. Readers aren't fools. They choose to spend their time on your blog, and if you have to force yourself to do the same, it shows. They'll slowly drift away.

The reality is, when you are a blogger, you get this.. need. You'll find yourself walking down the street on an average Tuesday after some encounter or reading some newspaper headline or having some conversation, writing a blog post in your head. Crafting the sentences in your mind, piling one on top of the other, anxious to get to a keyboard to hammer it out.

And that need, that urge, has mysteriously been missing in me for the last 19 weeks.

Is all my creative energy being expended in my uterus? Or have I simply lost my creativity entirely? I'm not sure. I have noticed that I've even had changes in my habits. I'm far more content puttering around the house now than I was previously. Perhaps I'm feeling more like I'm moving forward with a different part of life, rather than simply being "on hold" in the previous phase, and anything associated with the previous phase holds less appeal subliminally. I'm not sure. I do know that now, there's a whole world I'm participating in that I had consciously been avoiding before. Never stepped foot in a baby store, never cracked a pregnancy book. Now I stroll through baby stores and maternity clothing websites all the time; pick up pregnancy or breastfeeding books just to see what they say.

But with the loss of creativity has come a void; a void that's left me uncertain, anxious. I find myself wandering from room to room looking for something to do, time I would have previously spent researching or writing something. And perhaps in T1 (also known as "Those Three Months I Spent Sleeping") I simply just got out of the habit, and that anxiousness is the leftover energy from not forcing myself to just sit down and start writing something, anything. Even if it's garbage, putting the words down leads to putting more words down and getting them into decent shape and unleashing them on the interwebs.

The obvious question, of course, is why am I not blogging about the baby? And the answer, is, I don't know. In one respect, it's the obvious thing to do. It's only the most massive thing a person can go through, you'd think I'd get a little creative inspiration somewhere along the line. There's plenty I could be talking about. And yet... I simply don't want to. By blogging about the kid, she becomes public property. And I don't want to share her yet. There is a limited amount of time in which she is mine, in which our little world belongs to the two of us, and that time will go very quickly. Sooner than I care to think, she'll become a creature of the world all on her own, with nannies and playdates and friends and influences I can't control. And I'm OK with all of that. But for right now, she is where she is. She's mine. And for now, I'm keeping her that way.

So perhaps my creativity has simply come across a roadblock: my desire to keep our little world ours. This whole process is secret and intimate, and those things are in direct conflict with blogging. And if all I can think about is baby, yet I don't want to blog about it... that doesn't leave me with much else to talk about. Still, writing is habit-forming, and I need to exercise that habit somehow before I go too snaky.

Therefore, you can expect lots of posts... about my dog.