Blocked, or not.

Does everyone have the ability to be creative? That is what I have been thinking about lately. I noticed that I haven't written anything that was made-up or imaginative in some years now. I do write essays, papers, letters, notes, e-mails, and occasionally a poem or two, but not really a story or the beginnings of a novel. And the ideas I do have are really just a thinly-veiled unveiling of my actual life. I don't think I could even create a alternative persona on that new internet "game" Second Life. I have too much to do maintaining my first life. Life is truly stranger than fiction, so why create?

I also am not interested in talking about my distant past. Not because I have some deep, dark moments to hide or avoid---I had a fairly happy childhood. Oldest daughter of a special-education teacher and a salesman/Air Force pilot, I went on a bevy of vacations with my parents and my two sisters because we loved to travel. I have been on a one-month trip that included most of the states west of the Mississippi in a motor home. I have camped on the beaches of Cape Cod and Savannah, Georgia. I have been flown in a 4-seater Cessna to Lake Wawasee by my own father. I know there are funny anecdotes in my past, but who writes happy and gets away with it?

College life was a growth experience. I was traumatized by the fact that it changed me from a shy teenager to the extrovert I am today. I cried as I left my parent’s home, but I never looked back. I transferred schools in the middle of my freshman year, with little or no scars. I even learned that being the only white girl on a black floor was something I could learn to embrace and not fear. I even joined a sorority myself for a year—something basically unheard of from a science major. I spent the last year interning in a medical center laboratory, living back with my parents. Is there a magazine article here?

I married a medical student—the smartest man I have ever met-- and learned to adapt and grow with another person. I didn’t let him outgrow me and I kept up with him intellectually. We lived in an a few apartments and a few houses and reared three children to young adulthood. We have seen dogs and cars come and go. We have backpacked to Europe in our youth, and have ventured out to many other places as the years went by—Costa Rica, Mexico, England, San Francisco, New York. Twenty-seven years later I look across a dinner table at a man that still interests me. Some great fights, but no divorce. I won’t get on Oprah at this pace.

If I am to created something, it must be in the future. Somewhere in the “undiscovered country.” I find myself not wanted to revise my past, but to explore what’s in front of me yet.