It wasn't really that interesting of a diary, and nobody actually read it. But it helped me through some particularly difficult times in my life, and I miss keeping it.

I do not write anymore, not really. My job has moved to 100% project management. I was recently speaking to a colleague who floated the theory that a writer cannot be good at project management, and a project manager is typically not a good writer. Though I did not say so (because I'm humble that way), I'd like to counter that by saying that I'm really damn good at both. But I was a born writer and only fell into the project management stuff for money, which I make a shitload of now that I push paper and monitor deadlines, compared to when my sole responsibility was explaining complex ideas in 500 carefully chosen beautiful words.

But I miss it. Writing, I mean. And I have fallen out of the habit of doing it for fun. I am at a crossroads in my life right now where, for purely health-related reasons, I am forced to stop killing myself over work and take a breather every once in awhile. That is because I am pregnant. Eight weeks tomorrow. And I am determined, if I have any control over it whatsoever, not to give birth to a child who grows up to be an overachiever. I will have children who have self-esteem, a sense of self-worth, and who know how to congratulate themselves when they do a good job. So my coffee-bean-sized baby and I have made a deal. If I can be easier on myself now, s/he's going to come out being a pretty happy kid.

So I feel like writing more could possibly be the key to all of this. What if I could keep a journal because it is relaxing and therapeutic and fun for me, not because I feel obligated to? Or guilty for not doing it? What if I could spend my free time working on that novel I've started and stopped and started again, as a hobby, as a time for fun and relaxation, without worrying about how awful it is, or fretting over what people would think of it should I ever get hit by a bus and the file is recovered off my hard drive? What if I wrote for fun? It is a strange concept, one I have tried to embrace in the past, but ever since writing became a career for me, it became yet another in a long list of obligations with which I fight, constantly. I procrastinate, I make excuses, I struggle with it, until it becomes yet one more failure that I want to put away on a shelf. My writing. I let it torture me.