I’ve found my way here by desperate necessity, hoping that the blank page of an essentially anonymous online blog will free me from a profoundly crippling writer’s block. I want to write nearly all the time–that’s been true since I was a kid. But everything that is so full and fluent and sometimes even lyrical in my head unravels with the grip of a pen or the tap of a key. And yet the feeling of being moved to write–to render the world, to give shape on the page to all that is in my head–is nearly constant, and disconcertingly intense–and never moreso than now, with my mother’s death wobbling my world.

I need to get details and ruminations onto the page because it feels tormenting to have them always in my mind, festering for want of a page. I am one of those people who notice things. I zero in on the odd dots of experience, connect them, take them in to simmer and percolate into nouns and verbs and adjectives, into description and narrative. I apprehend the world as an amalgamation of stories and mysteries. In a sense what I really am–at 49 as much as at age 9–is an omnivorous girl sleuth. Everything I see or hear is an intriguing fragment of possibly relevant information, a lead, a clue. My brain is an unruly jumble of musings and wonderings, invented and remembered stories, snatches of dialogue, song lyrics, questions, fetching turns of phrase and sometimes entire paragraphs longing to become something more.

I also know–have been led to believe–that I have a knack for it. Writing, that is. In college, an English professor downgraded a hasty but entirely competent treatise I’d turned in for a 18th-century Brit lit class with the written aside, “As you no doubt know, you can write circles around most of your contemporaries,” going on to suggest that in light of that purported fact, my takes on on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or Fielding’s Tom Jones were unworthily glib. It wasn’t the first time I heard that sort of backhanded compliment, and far from the last–and it may have been in some way the making of, or a part of the making of, what has been become an abiding and agonizing neurosis, a debilitating tangle of insecurity, perfectionism, and anxiety about writing that has all but rendered me mute.

I read a piece in The New Yorker a while back about people afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s and other terrible diseases that ultimately can lead to a state of being “locked in”–having full possession of one’s cognitive faculties, but being completely unable to speak or even to twitch an eyelid for “yes” or “no”–in other words, being utterly locked in with no way at all to respond or to communicate with another living soul. I can think of few scenarios quite as horrible. I’m not locked in; I don’t suffer from a horrifyingly sad disease and I don’t for a moment equate my sense of expressive strangulation with having Lou Gehrig’s—all of which makes me more desperately determined to propel words onto the page. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who as a distinguished intellectual and jurist ought not necessarily to have known about such things, I don’t want to die with my music still in me.

I may as well back up a bit, though, to admit that it’s not strictly accurate that I don’t write. It’s true that I actually write for a living, at least some of the time. But the sort of writing I do for hire–brochure copy for nonprofit organizations or college magazine pieces on professor A’s sociological theories or Professor B’s engineering formulas –has little to do with the thwarted writerly self that gives me torment. (And even so, the dullest assignment–say 900 earnest words on planned giving–can give me fits.)

Back to this blog: I’m hoping this online and essentially anonymous blank page, will be the clean, well-lighted place where I can manage to write, if only in clumsy blurts and bytes. The sheer desperate necessity of it. My world unsettled by mother-loss, by economic meltdown, by my discomfiting sense of midlife drift. The need to make sense of things. To seek, to find, a surer, clearer sense of my midlife motherless floundering self, a firmer sense of meaning and purpose. I’m thinking that if I can only take the pressure off … get rid of the remorselessly demanding inner editor (or censor) … Something like being able to sing (however badly, but with verve and gusto) in the car, or in the shower if there’s no one around to hear.

I haven’t told a soul (i.e., anyone I actually know in my real life) that I am doing this. And to anyone who may run across this blog while browsing, I only ask that you be forgiving. That you keep your expectations low … disregarding the buildup engendered by all the blah blah blah about my being a tortured and allegedly talented writer, praised by teachers and all the rest of it. The essential truth is that even if my teachers were right, I’ve written almost nothing real, nothing expressive or creative, for many years. So how good could I be? By trying this blog, I hope to find out, and maybe to get better. I think of this as Mia, promising amateur, scribbling in notebooks in the cupboard under the stairs.