Apprehension

When I first started my blog, I wrote with abandon.

I was willing to put everything out there and felt I had nothing to lose.  I owned my alcoholism, my fragile mental health, and every aspect of my story.

For me, writing was cathartic.  A chance to finally share what had been swirling in my mind for years. I felt empowered and as if I was finally coming into my own.  I owned my writing as a part of my identity that I hadn't been able to grasp in my active alcoholism.  

Suddenly, I'd found my voice, and I wanted everyone to hear it.  

I wrote fervently, convinced I had something important to say, that my words needed to land on the page, then the internet.

I was fearless. 

And then, I had a bipolar breakdown.  

My boyfriend broke up with me, I had to quit my job, and I had to move home back into my Dad's apartment.  

I lost everything. 

As I emerged from the mental institution I was held in after my breakdown, getting back to my blog felt all-important.  I was eager to share what happened to me, to continue the writing I'd taken to so passionately.

But as I adjusted to my meds and stabilized, something shifted. 

I struggled to write and questioned everything I put on the page.

I'd start and abandon draft after draft, unsure if I should really share more of my story.  I looked back at my blog, embarrassed and, in some cases, horrified by how much of myself I'd put out there on the internet.

Armed with my new diagnosis, I questioned everything I'd previously penned. 

And as I look back on my writing, I wonder how much of it was me and how much of it was unchecked, undiagnosed bipolar disorder?  What was me and what was mania?

It's a scary question to face and a terrible feeling to have, to feel like you did something when you were out of your right mind that you wouldn't normally do.

Unfortunately, I'm familiar with this feeling because it typically accompanied many of my hangovers.  When I was drinking, I was constantly doing things that I wouldn't normally do.  I lowered my standards, abandoned my morals, and negotiated my values on a regular basis.

I don't like that feeling. And I don't typically encounter it in sobriety.  

But in the wake of my breakdown, here it was again, staring back at me from the very public pages of the internet. 

My first instinct was to delete it all.  I grappled with the decision of whether to scrape myself from the page, to leave a 404 error where my unguarded musings had once been. 

But wasn't it already too late?  Hadn't I already plastered the details of my personal life out there for everyone to see?  

Nothing ever really gets deleted from the internet, I thought. 

Ultimately, I decided against deleting everything, but then I was faced with a new problem:  I had nothing new to publish. 

At first, it tortured me.  When I started my blog, I actually had a backlog of content built up, so I would never commit the cardinal sin of blogging: not posting consistently.  It felt like a failure to suddenly stop, but no matter how many drafts I started, I couldn't write.  

I'd become guarded and apprehensive.  And it showed through every word.

And so I got quiet.  After a few less-than-stellar blogs back, I stopped posting.

Blogs became out of the question.  I struggled to work on my book. I let my attendance in my writing group slip and limited my wordsmithing to work, where I kept my writing tightly bound and painfully in line with the rigorous demands of the company style guides.

Finally, I've started writing again, but I'm still hesitating.  I've returned to my craft more cautiously than before. 

I know this is like the third writing-process piece I've written, and that I've been writing a lot about my writer's block.  

I'm trying to push through it, to keep putting writing down on the page, to show myself there's still power in my words, even now that I'm choosing them more carefully.