Another layer in the mask

I didn't know what to title this post. But I got a bit of a wakeup call from a dear friend today - what we have jokingly referred to as God's holy sledgehammer. It was about me and my blogging - or, not blogging as the case may be. I've been doing this little experiment with blogging as a way to share my musings with friends, and a way to test the waters as a writer. To see if I can get all these ideas floating around in my head down in some concrete form so I can have my brain back. I have 3 kids - I need the brain back once in a while.

Only, I get stuck. A lot. See, there is a problem that many writers or would-be writers suffer. The problem of trying to write and edit at the same time. Which my dear friend pointed out to me is exactly what I was doing. Ouch.

This ties in very neatly with a previous post I did on our profound conversations following my "watershed moment." It's about the problem of wearing masks. You know, that public face that we all put on so that people will not run away screaming when they meet us. It's necessary in a civilized society. But some of us, like me, learn the lesson all too well when we are very young. Hence, the Editor....on my mouth, on my brain, on my actions. Somewhere along the line the Editor has come in and taken over my life. And my writing, evidently. There's an old saw that my dad used to say, "If a thing is worth doing it's worth doing well." So I try. I agonize. Over every word, every nuance, every thought. Is this acceptable? How we people read this? What will they think of me? Yikes!

And you know what? It almost hurts in a long underused part of my brain to just type this out in stream-of-consciousness form. Kind of like trying to write with my wrong hand. Amazingly, I find my fingers flying across the keys hardly able to keep up with my thoughts. This is the way I write when I write just for me, in my old fashioned journal with a regular old ball point. It's refreshing - kind of. It's also scary, like riding a bicycle down a hill when you know you have no brakes.

Funny, I seem to always have had this idea lurking in the back of my mind that if I don't convey the perfect thought with the perfect words, it won't mean as much to anyone reading it. Too many years of English classes and being corrected by my English teacher mother, I guess. It's like my brain decided that the real me is like Freud's id and so my superego Editor has to rein that in of course. For the good of society - ha! The Editor always wants me to be highly profound. Which I'm usually not, most days. Many of the things I might have shared on this blog my Editor told me were too ordinary, to blase to be of interest to anyone but me. So the next time that pesky Editor starts whispering in my ear, I'm going to do something I have rarely done - I'm going to slap him on the wrist and tell him to go away!

In the meantime, he's sitting in a corner, hyperventilating....