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.