I told a friend the other day that my muse is mute. She visited me yesterday but the post that she whispered isn’t ready for public consumption. Life has to catch up with my thoughts, the timing is wrong. So it will languish in my drafts folder until I have the confirmation necessary to push the publish button. Fickle inspiration left me with little else to work with though I can’t say I really blame her as I’m not giving her much to work with either. Writing, for me, is an emotionally focused endeavor. I don’t need the angst of Sylvia Plath or joy’s equivalent but there does need to be some sort of emotional interest and focus. And lately the focus has been lacking. The emotions are there in spades but in such a jumbled, chaotic mess that trying to put anything on paper feels like trying to thread a small needle with thick yarn…you can struggle and start to pull it through but strands of yarn end up snarled and tangled around the needle leaving you with a bigger mess than when you started. So yes, writing has been almost painful lately. Twitter gives me an easy out. It’s instant gratification. Jot down a quick thought in 140 characters or less and receive immediate feedback. A thought can be shared without the pressure of fleshing it into an entire post. Maybe my muse isn’t mute. Maybe she’s pouting. It’s also a great social networking resource that has resulted in a couple of new friendships and the social butterfly within me would normally be all a-flitter but along with that whole jumbled emotional mess is the feeling of being in limbo, that life is on hold until I know that one final puzzle piece is falling into place and I can hit the launch button on the rest of my life. (a four plus line sentence…some sort of record perhaps?) That doesn’t mean I’m living as if life is on hold but it’s a constant battle to maintain this elusive balance between now and soon/what if. And it’s the soon and more so the what ifs that are weighing heavy enough lately to threaten to pull me back down into that melancholy state that hovers just under my consciousness. I know that state. I know that slippery slope. And it’s not someplace I want to revisit during waking hours, I’ve seen it enough lately while asleep thankyouverymuch. But this too will pass. Both the melancholy and the pouty muse. Somehow I’m betting they’re related.