The First Baseman

I use to be a writer. Years ago, when I was in the fourth grade, I wrote my first short story. It was my first attempt at creative writing and it was a class assignment. I called the story "The First Baseman," and yes, it was about my one true love at the time, baseball. I don't remember much about the story and I have no copy of it. But I do remember how lost I was in the process of writing the story and what a satisfying experience it was. I also remember that on the basis of that story, I was put into a high level English class. In the fourth grade we sat in the same seat, with the same teacher and classmates, day in and day out for the whole school year. Post story, I was leaving 3 days a week to sit it on an advanced English class. I had never been singled out in such a way up to that point in my life.

During my high school years I continued to spend time writing short stories and very bad poetry for my own pleasure. By that time I was in an all-girls Catholic school in the Bronx, and we were all knee deep in the 60's experience. I still have the notebook that I kept much of that personal writing in. The few times I 've picked it up to read what I had written 40 years ago (how the hell did that happen?) I cringed and put it down quickly.

During those years I wrote freely and without self-consciousness. As a matter of fact, it was one of the very few things I was NOT self-conscious about. Adolescence was a painful, torturous time for me, and I retreated to my writing as the only haven available. I didn't want to "be" a writer back then. I was a writer. Defining a writer as someone who writes, without regard to the quality or commercial value of it, I was very much a writer and worked at it almost daily.

As I got older I relied less and less on writing as an emotional and psychic outlet and engaged instead in rehab, verbal communication with others and, to put it bluntly, acting out. I lost my inner voice for writing. Every once in a while I'd get a desire to write again, but while I think about writing I can't think of what to write.

Could it be that after having lived for more than half a century that I have less to say than I did when I was 10 or 16 years old? Or is it that I have nothing to say at all regardless of how long I have lived? Perhaps I am just really self-conscious about it now. Maybe I've let go of all the modesty and uptightness I had in my youth in all areas and moved it to the expression of my inner voice. I wrote a series of essays on gay history in the late eighties that was published in some local gay and lesbian newspapers in NYC, but beyond that I have only written in my journal and this blog, and I consider neither real writing. This, to me, is journaling. Journaling has its value, but it is a behind the scenes precursor to writing, making art, or just finding balance in my life. It is not a final product.

I'm stuck. I want to write again, and I don't. I don't even know where to begin. Rather than sit with this, as I usually do, I am writing it and putting it out there. Not to get feedback or advice. Just to get it out of me. So, if all I write about is not writing, well, at least I've written something.