Late night agonizing

After an hour of attempting to post about the world, I've decided it's absolutely hopeless and will now proceed to bore you, dear reader, with Personal Shit. I realize it hardly qualifies for "crap of grave importance," but maybe if I get it off my chest I'll be able to sleep a little better tonight.

I forgot to mention last week that I finally passed the 100-post mark on the blog, and it only took me eight months of agonizing nights, flirtations at true dedication and a ferocious Oregon winter that won't end. The milestone is a quirky mixture for my psyche: A sign of accomplishment that I've put my opinions out there and garnered a few interested readers, but also a lingering symbol of all I haven't done -- unexplored intellectual territories and constant personal reflection of my potential.

Basically, I've been struggling lately with my demons as a wordsmith. Sometimes I experience a sudden panic, starting in my stomach and ebbing slowly throughout my body, at the prospect that I'm just an average writer. Often I wonder whether I'm any good at all. I'm sure the people who perceive my offerings to be consistently interesting and witty will take my personal reservations as some kind of self-righteous self-doubt, but for me it's a nagging fear that nothing I say makes any damn sense. Or the way I say it.

It's possible that what I'm experiencing is writer's block, or lack of inspiration, or any of the other excuses many writers use to mask their lack of talent and creativity. It just terrifies me when I struggle to make a simple sentence sound good, or clever, or original. I try to say too much, and from my perspective it all gets lost in translation. Then again, a blog is traditionally a conversational forum for writers, and for me often a stream-of-consciousness experience. Maybe my thoughts would flow better if I knew my words would be in print or read by millions of people.

Anyway, I'm tipping my glass to all you confused writers out there trying to make sense of your own ambitions and talents. Maybe we should all stop thinking and do something about it.