Frustration

Yes, tomorrow is move in day and I am very excited about moving into our awesome little rent house here in town.  It's going to be chaotic due to the fact that there is not enough room in the Airstream to pack before we move.  I am alright with the chaos because I know that it is just a part of the process. 

My frustration has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is currently going on in my life.  My frustration comes from a small quiet voice deep inside that becomes louder with each post I make on this blog.  This small voice keeps telling me that in a literary sense my voice has changed. 

Let me go back a few years for those of you who aren't sure what I mean.  I am a writer before anything else that  I do professionally.  I am a poet who has lost her ability to write poetry; I'm not sure that it is actually gone I am only sure that I can no longer find it.  I am sure it was there once just over a decade ago, I know I had talent and promise, but I somehow feel as though I have squandered it.  If I knew just what went wrong I could find it again and I could write again. 

In 1999 I auditioned and was accepted into the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, my poetry, my ability beat out several other high school students in Oklahoma.  In 2000 I was accepted again but even at the audition I felt as though my ability to write poetry was slipping away, little did I know that by August of that year it would be totally gone, or if not gone unreachable. 

By the time I entered college in the fall of 2000 I knew it was gone and at the protests of my friends and some of my professors I refused to pursue an English or Creative Writing degree because of this.  I tried desperately to write again on an almost constant basis.  I tried so often that it affected my ability to concentrate in class or do homework.  I enrolled in as many English courses as I could, in hopes that they would somehow force me into writing poetry again. 

They didn't, even as much as I wanted them to. 

I ended up dropping out of college a few years later and because I didn't have a degree I had to work in jobs that forced me to dumb myself down for the sake of the customers and even my coworkers.  I feel like the years that I spent doing so caused me to lose my voice.  As I read my previous posts and look at the language and punctuation used, I feel as though they were not written by me.  I feel as though their style and grammar are remedial.  I feel as though any refinement I once had is gone. 

I am just so frustrated by it. 

I am not going to stop blogging because of my current frustration.  I'm just going to keep plugging away post after post, in hopes that my voice will start to come back.  I just wish it weren't too much to ask to one day be able to sit down and write poetry once again.  I miss the release and the satisfaction that I used to feel after completing that final stanza and knowing that what I had just produced was quality work and not just some remedial sophomoric drivel.