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For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:

What is a skill that I’m grateful to possess?

Well, writing, duh. 

Part of me wants to end this post right there. I was just thinking about my “couldn’t be bothered by social niceties” 30-year-old self, and I would have responded verbally in that way and with that tone. Ack. 

We all go through stuff and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve developed or used my writing to deal with all the twists and turns along the way. As a teenager, who hadn’t been much of a reader at all, I experimented with poetry to deal with the craziness, then I moved to songwriting as a better form of expression. In my early twenties, somewhat frustrated by my limited musical abilities, I started thinking of my self more as a prose writer than songwriter. It seems like it’s just always been there. 

Essays, short stories, articles, I put together a satire newspaper in the 80s, Air, Dirt & Ink, that ran for five issues. I even got some friends to write articles. This was before online blogging became a thing, but was created on whatever computer (PC clone) I was working with at the time. First issue had no graphics and even had a little ASCII art… damn, looks like I’ve figured out the next thing I need to archive on my blog… those five issues of ADI.

So, I don’t know what would have happened if writing hadn’t been there to help me deal with it all. I imagine that I would have found some other outlet, and I have experimented with other creative endeavors or adjacent art forms like photography and videography. But writing has been the glue that has held all the different versions of myself together over the years. Now on to the next project…

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