I started blogging years ago in this very journal to work out the fact that I was a punk who found herself living in the doldrums of suburbia. It just didn't make sense how I, someone who had dreamed of a more hardcore, rock 'n' roll lifestyle, could end up in this situation.
When I was in my 20s, I did everything to make sure I didn't fall into the suburban dream that seemed more like my mother's lifelong ambition than mine. My mom always wanted the perfect, nuclear family with the children, the loving husband, and the comfortable life that forever came with the happy ending. Instead, she got instability, turmoil, a man who only appreciated her for the work she could do and made her do that work 24/7, and kids who couldn't wait to get the hell away from her. She had anxiety and depression issues, but we didn't know that until she died at 49 years old.
It is kind of a sad, sick irony that I wound up with the life she always wanted, and thanks to that irony, I've spent more than my fair share of hours on therapists' couches trying to figure out whether I truly chose this path, or if it was something that was pounded into my head as I was growing up.
I could contemplate this situation for a thousand years, and probably never have an answer, so I took to writing to relieve some of the angst. It helped, and worked great for a few years, then I was struck with the most cruel of afflictions; writer's block. I've been writing since the second grade, and it has always come easy to me. The words just flowed out of my fingers and onto a page without a second thought. I love to write, and it was the one thing I felt I was truly good at, so I can't even tell you how fucked I felt when my gift was gone.
I tried writing several times, but it was pure crap. I cringe when I recall the two pieces I wrote for a British feminist indie mag. They were pathetic, and I knew it. The worst part was that I couldn't figure out what brought on the block; was it the second baby or the job that nearly ran me into the ground or maybe it was moving from Seattle to sunny Southern California. There were many nights when I stayed up trying to write, only to end up in tears, and I'm not someone who cries over much of anything.
I had nearly given up on ever writing anything again, and had even thought of killing this blog. Then I got hit with the time bomb known at 40. I began dreading the arrival of my 40th birthday back in mid-December. As it came closer, I wrestled with the realization that half my life was officially over. I know we don't know how long we will be here, and at any point we could all be hit by a bus or keel over from some crazy shit we didn't know we had, but statistically, the average life expectancy of the American female is 80 years old, so I was at the halfway mark.
To deal with the pending doom of admitting that my youth was gone, I did something so pathetically cliche I laughed my way through it; I created a bucket list. I filled it with things I wanted to do and places I want to see, and since it was 1:30 am when I did the list, I finished it and went to bed. I don't know what kind of crazy voodoo magic happened on the night that I created that bucket list, but I woke up the next morning and spent an hour and a half writing 40 pages of a graphic novel that's been stewing in my head for a couple of years.
I guess this is the long way to tell you, the very few who still check in and wonder where the fuck I've been, that I'm back, and I plan to continue writing with the same flare I always have. I may be a couple years older, and still living in suburbia, but I'm just as much of a punk as I ever was, and now I'm 40, which means I give even less of a fuck than I did before, only now when I give less of that fuck I'm probably wearing yoga pants while drinking wine. Cheers!
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