What I Did With the Draft

There was a document sitting in a folder on my laptop, titled, embarrassingly, 'not for the blog', that I have been opening and closing since last July. Nine months. I know that because I checked the created date this morning, right before I deleted it.

I didn't publish it. I thought about it for a long time, and honestly the thing I kept running into was that it had become too precious to me to mean anything to anyone else. You know how you can revise something until the life goes out of it? It was like that. It was a mission statement dressed up as an essay and what I actually needed to write was something smaller and more embarrassing: that I started this blog in 2007 mostly to have a reason to keep going. The running, the community college application I sat on for three months before I mailed it, all of it, The Hartwells was never really about the lifestyle part. I think I knew that before I could say it out loud.

So I wrote that instead. A few paragraphs. Posted them before I could do my usual thing of hovering and reconsidering. The creative writing class I signed up for in the fall, another thing I've been weirdly quiet about on here, feels related somehow, though I couldn't tell you how exactly. I'll figure that out in September probably.

the exact second before you can't take it back

Happy Easter to anyone who celebrates. I'm going to make coffee and sit by the window and not open any drafts today. That's the whole plan.

after