Reader, I [am overly romantic].

mlh responded to my first post (thank you mlh) and, in the grand spirit of April blogging, I wanted to (a) recognize that mlh is and always will be awesome, (b) wonder why I like lists so much, and (c) talk about what mlh said, because it gave me back a way of talking about writing that I had let go of during law school.

I read your pinterest quotes about writing and I think they point to something interesting that I've always suspected: you are a writer. It's what you are, not just what you do, although, of course, they are related, but mostly, it's just the way you interact with the world, the way you work through things. Maybe that's overly romantic, but that's what I think.

I always love a block quote.

This is probably stating the obvious, but I binged on Pinterest writing quotes the other night. A few of my favorites:

"You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy and that hard." Neil Gaiman

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann

I'm not going to lie--I don't think I've ever read anything by Thomas Mann. But he isn't wrong. And I trust F. Scott Fitzgerald and Neil Gaiman. They have both saved me at different times in my life. Neil Gaiman's books will always conjure up an old empty two-bedroom apartment in Chicago that was so cold and quiet. So quiet. Fitzgerald makes me think of K, even though I read him in high school.

This was supposed to be about writing, but writing is entangled with reading. It's impossible to separate the two, from the writers who inspire to the inevitable workshop when your professor reads your poem and asks if you've been reading Li-Young Lee again. (Answer: always.)

I have a list of "Writers Who I Read" at the top of this blog. I'm going to work on building it with quotes and works and links and whatever else I dig up. Because this is how I see the world, how I interact with the world--through language and text and the written word. It doesn't always matter if I'm the one who wrote it, as much as I love that feeling. Jay Hopler once said (he probably doesn't remember saying this, but I wrote it down and carried it with me to Chicago and back) he once said, "Language has to be beautiful in a way the world cannot be." I think that's right. But I also think that language makes the world beautiful in a way that we don't expect it to be beautiful. Even the language of the law (thought you weren't going to hear about that this time, didn't you?)

Pair with the "Writer Who I Read" the list of "April," a group of writers who mentored and defined me. You'll see that mlh is one. She's brilliant and aware and I never tell her how important she has been to me--from the first day she called me "scarf girl" at an Inscape meeting. Everyone should have a friend who helps them see the world. I've been lucky enough to have several. And, again, as I build this blog, I hope to feature those friendships. Including you, Reader.

Reader, I [am not 25].

The thought behind this blog is one part wedding blog that will never happen (but how perfect would "Reader, I Married Him" be as a wedding blog--so perfect that it probably already exists out on the interwebs) and one part a moment from my first semester of law school when a friend was lamenting that she was turning 25. There was some small part of me that wanted to turn that moment into a blog post right when it happened titled, of course, "Reader, I [am not 25]." I guess good things come to those who wait.

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There is some part of me that wants to talk about the past. A friend and I met up tonight to do just that, and to try to figure out how we got from point A (2004) to point B (now). Ten years is a lot to account for and we barely scratched the surface. I'm not sure where he thought he'd be in 2014, but I know I never thought I'd be in law school. I never thought that I'd like law school. But what we talked about tonight makes me want to talk about the present more than the past.

I am not 25. I'm 30. Maybe five, almost six, years isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things. Then again, for some people, it's an entire lifetime.

I called my mom on the way home from meeting with this friend. I tried to explain that I don't always feel grown up. That staying in school for this long has made me feel somewhat stagnant. But I forget that I've done more than school and the school that I've done has been diverse and interesting and challenging. My MFA program was rewarding because it was hard. Writing is rewarding because it's hard. There's nothing easy about it--and if it is easy, it's usually not good writing.

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I'm getting distracted. I tend to do that. The whole point of this post, of realizing that I'm not 25, is that I'm glad I am where I am, at the age I am. It may not look anything like what I thought 30 would look like. I'm still a student. I'm still single. I'm still living in Provo. But, as I tried to explain to my friend and my 2004 self tonight, I've spent the past ten years making choices and deciding who I am. I'm happier at 30 than I was at 25. There's something to be said for owning not just who you are, but the narrative of how you became who you are. As I consider what this blog is and will be, I hope that's the narrative I share. Those moments when I was myself, and maybe not myself, and why I'm good right where I'm at.

And maybe, just sometimes, this will also be a wedding blog.

Reader, I [am writing].

I am blogging again.

It’s a verb, blogging. It’s been a verb for a long time. But when I first started blogging (to impress a boy and my best friend, in that order) it was an oddity. You had to explain “web log” and the slurring that made it into “blog” and that that noun could be verbed. Blogging.

I gave myself this blog for my 30th birthday. Never mind that I’ll be 31 in a few months (six weeks, but who’s counting?). I thought it was time to create something new (you can read my past at editorgirl.blogspot.com). But it was harder than it sounded. There were law school finals, law school write-on for law review, law school externship. Notice a trend here?

Someday I’ll tell you why I left writing to become a lawyer. I’ll tell you as soon as I figure it out. But it’s time to leave law school—at least temporarily, once a day—to write again. I've felt this part of myself angry and sad and lonely as of late.

I suspect I will tell stories here. Probably pontificate more than a little. Share poems and frustrations, which are often the same thing. Share photographs. I've decided I will be less guarded than I have been in the past. At 30, I have found, you can own who you are. I at least have that. (And there are no boys to impress this time.)

What finally got me to write tonight was this thought: Blogging facilitates being with people when you also need to be alone. It connects—or at least can connect you—to any number of readers and people and once upon a time blogging was about a conversation for me and a group of people. And that was a terrible sentence, but I’m not re-writing it. I need people again. I should say that I have people—family, roommates, friends—and most of them are tolerant of my rambling and my tangents and my need to figure my world out. But I need to be writing again. Not just legal briefs and case notes and whatever else I should be doing right now instead of writing a blog. Writing for a reader. So I’m borrowing a line from Jane Eyre, severely truncating it, and making it my own (maybe I should write a post on how a poet/writer/blogger sits through copyright class with her head in her hands—but there's time for that later).

Reader, I am a law student. I'm also a writer. I have to convince myself that those two beings are not mutually exclusive.