So I didn't sit down to write about this, but it is what came out

Several weeks ago I located an old friend.  I googled him and he popped right up.  It was disarmingly easy.

I sent him an email.  The email was abrupt and strangely worded, but I don't know how to do things any other way.  I can be a little intense. Shocking revelation, huh?  But he wasn't phased by having me jump into his inbox after 18 years.

So now we have an email friendship.  It's not a real friendship because we don't really know each other anymore.  I can't imagine any scenario where we would ever catch up over coffee or meet at the park to watch our kids play together. But it has meaning for me anyway. It has been comforting for me to have contact with this person from my former life (read:youth). It allows me to think about myself as a sentimental person, whereas before I would have described myself as purposefully unsentimental. 

I have always been able to let people walk out of my life when we were finished with each other.  I don't give in to the "what ifs".  My life has been one big "what if" from the moment I was born.  I adopted a no speculation policy at a young age and it has served me well.

But for some reason this person was always there in a rusty file drawer in my hippocampus. Yes, I picture my brain like a file cabinet.  I am very good at compartmentalizing my feelings.  I actually file them away to be dealt with when I am ready.  You should see me in a tough meeting.  When everyone else is upset or angry I just stick it all in a drawer and keep things moving.  I have a fabulous "meeting face" which is much like a poker face, but involves slight smirking which is probably not good during poker.  Anyway, he was there, the one person I still occasionally wondered about.  Not in a "what if we were together" kind of way more like a "what would this person think about this" kind of way.

So, I didn't sit down to write about this, but I read an email from him right as I logged on and he said something about the blog that really struck me:

"It's important to have something that's yours, to mark the time and focus your thinking about the things that are happening."

Before the blog, I had nothing that was just mine.  I was feeling lost and unfocused.  It is amazing how much more attention I pay to my life now that I have this blog.  Everything has blog potential which makes me consider the moments I was letting pass me by.  Even if something doesn't make it in a post, I still lived it more fully because it had potential at the time. I am not doing this for attention or money or really even for sentimentality.  I am doing this because it is the first creative outlet I have ever found that fit for me.

I have said this before and I will say it again - THANK YOU JO FOR SUGGESTING I START A BLOG.  I had no idea how much I needed to do this.