Everything.

This blog has been seriously lacking in real content, aside from Truth Tuesday and the occasional TMI Thursday. October is more than half over and I haven’t written a single “regular” post this month. Last month I wrote about five, which is still pretty sad.

The thing is, there’s plenty I could be writing about. Things I want to write, because I want to remember, and I want feedback, and I want interaction, and I want to be creative. What’s lacking is motivation…energy…urgency. Life is good. Life is BUSY. There are too many other things to be doing which knock blogging down to the bottom of the list.

But what I have realized, repeatedly, when I find myself in these periods of not blogging for awhile, is that if I don’t write on a regular basis, I feel it. I sense that I’m missing out on something. Blogging helps me to retain memories, it heightens my senses and my awareness, and it gives me a chance to interact with people I don’t otherwise get to interact with. For as unimportant as blogging can sometimes seem to me in the day-to-day, in the long run I know I’m truly losing out on a lot when I bail like I have been lately.

I should be writing about the silly conversations Joe and I have, the experiments with cooking stuff sans recipe or instructions, the sermons in church that make me go “hmm,” the struggles with keeping our bedroom tidy (MY struggle, that is), and the butterflies I get in my stomach when I stop long enough to recognize how blessed I am…

I should be venting about my frustrations with having no idea what sort of career I want (yet knowing I do NOT want to keep doing what I’m doing now, if I can help it). I should be spilling my guts because that’s what I created this blog for. To say anything and everything. To let people in on who I am — people who are far away, or who have common interests, or who are in a similar place in life, or are just plan curious about a 20-something newlywed living in Southern California.

I need this to be about ME again. Not that it’s become about someone else, really… I guess I just feel like my focus for the blog has been lost lately, through a series of circumstances that have led to its unintentional neglect.

(And don’t even get me started on my bead blog. It’s still in my mind. I still want to do it. I’m GOING to do it. But right now, this one comes first.)

My mental well-being comes first.

My memories come first.

See, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I have a terrible memory. I mean it’s REALLY bad. I have to squint my eyes really tight and rack my brain just to remember what I did last weekend. So I blog to remember. When I write it down, it sticks in my mind so much more clearly. It’s similar to taking photos (which I ALSO don’t do nearly as often as I should), but because I am a writer by nature, the words are the glue to keep my memories safely in the pages of my mental scrapbook. (I really should come up with a better analogy, but that one is just cheesy enough that I’m keeping it.)

I was looking at the site where our professional wedding photos are located, and remembering the day and all the joy and excitement that I felt, and it came flooding back to me as if I was suddenly recalling my first time riding a bike; as if it were THAT LONG AGO, that far off in the distance, and I had let the memory fade, and had given in to the fact that I’d never really “see” it again. I got married less than three months ago! How can that memory seem so distant already?

I mean, okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit…but this is really how my life seems to go, more often than not. It’s like…yes, I KNOW I’ve been to Disneyland in the last year, but NO I don’t remember much of anything specific or concrete about that day. Yes, I KNOW I’ve seen that movie or read that book, but the moment the phrase “The End” registered in my brain, the details just vanished and left me with a mere impression. I liked it, but I can’t really remember what happened.

This is why I blog. If I can make it to my computer within a certain amount of time after an event or a thought/idea/epiphany/whatever, and if I sit down and write about it, then I won’t forget. Or at least, if I do forget, I can go back and read my words and be reminded.

Out of all the reasons I have for blogging (and there are so, so many of them), this has ALWAYS been the most important one. To remember.

I want to remember everything.