Earlier today I was thinking about how resistant I am to blogging, especially about personal things, and why that is. I have no issue revealing pretty much anything in essays that end up seeing print. When I first started a website, I assumed I’d keep it as professional as a resume, and then a friend gave me the constructive note that “it would be great to get inside your head more,” which came back to my mind today as I was sitting in class. Dr. Oliver Sacks is the professor of this four-week course, and that alone is mind-blowing to me, to be able to sit in a room and listen to him. His class is called “The Case Study” – the reading list consists of books I’d probably never pick up on my own and am so glad I’m being prompted to read, books with titles like The Man With a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound and A Journey Round My Skull.
Maybe my blogging should be more of a journey around my own skull, even if no one reads it.

Dr. Sacks got us talking about journaling, and I remembered I used to keep a journal faithfully — until I started writing professionally. Then the journals became mere notebooks for recording ideas for essays, articles, novels, memoir…some of the rawness left my work. I want to try to get more of the uncensored, emotion-filled writing of the journals into writing created with an audience in mind. As an introverted, private person I do feel a resistance to that sometimes, a resistance I know I’d be better off overcoming. Reading the diary of a brain-wounded soldier who wrote over three-thousand pages of lucid, arresting prose while not being able to read it back to himself was the most inspiring thing I’ve come across in some time. Should be required reading for all writers. (Man With a Shattered World) We’ll never complain again.