Natalie Kane

Getting back to business.

Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red on Red, 1964.

So, I’ve decided to return to blogging again. There’s something about major life upheaval, the extraction of an appendix, and uncertainty that makes one want to crawl back into the open bosom of the internet. I have been incredibly lazy with ‘sorting things out’, and yearning after that calm that I’ve been promised without doing much about it, but I’m getting there now. Reading certain people’s blogs has done a surprising amount of good, which I’ll name here because I admire them very much; Elizabeth Cason for her strength, Elizabeth Wilcox/Cantwell for aspiration, Tyler D. Maygar for the soul. I’m becoming more confident about my writing, even though I haven’t written for a long time. Partly from a lack of any real ‘space’ to call my own, and without tiring out an old cliché, it really does make a difference to have a room of one’s own. I’ve been living with JP for the last few months, and happy as I am here, I have only just started to write again after signing on a new flat with him. The last few months have had me wondering how love could change a person, and whether you always had that capacity for change, or whether it was conjured from deceptively thin air. Now I know that it’s not as simple as that. 

I haven’t been particularly engaging with the internet lately, and no, refreshing tumblr and Facebook doesn’t count as engagement, neither does researching diseases you don’t have, or people you’ll probably never know. If you look for something you don’t have, you either end up with something you didn’t want, or a hole you never knew you had.  I always end up with some sort of cancer, or getting annoyed I don’t have Stephen Fry’s phone number. I’ve wasted a lot of time thinking about where life is going to go for me now, and as things start becoming a lot more stable – a new flat, academic prospects, professional prospects – I feel a little less scared. But we’re supposed to be scared aren’t we. We’re supposed to come back from a virtual hiatus with a blog post that tells everyone that you are refreshed and enlightened and OK. That’s how it works. So, onwards.