I lost my words. Not lost like losing the car keys, knowing they’re somewhere but just lacking the memory of where. Not lost like a beloved pet, where you’ll pound the streets, tape up mimeographed posters on power poles and maintain this blistering determination that they’ll return, that everything will be okay.

This loss was different.

It felt inexplicably terminal. It felt so not okay. I had some words, not many. They didn’t cohere into sentences, and paragraphs were way too far to grasp, or even to lunge clumsily towards. And, to rub salt into the proverbial wound, I all of a sudden had absolutely nothing to say.

Because I somehow lost my confidence. At some murky juncture between my mid twenties and now, I forgot that I had skills and talents. And while I remembered acutely that I wanted to make the world a somehow better place, I had not the faintest idea or conviction that I could do so.

My blog has languished, untended and unnourished. When you leave a garden alone, at least nature gives you weeds, and plants get bigger. They might even make beautiful flowers, cast off seeds, grow again. Not so in a digital landscape, sadly. What’s unkempt, stays that way. No rogue crops, no pretty lady bugs, no merciful rain to bring fertility back again.

Just nothing. A big fat empty nothing.

I don’t know that I’ve found any words yet. And I can’t quite work out what I might do for and in this crazy world. It all feels achingly elusive. But maybe, just maybe, I’m slowly finding my way back.