I’ve been meaning to share this for a while & honestly just keep forgetting. I figured some of you might like to know the inspiration behind the title of this blog. If you’ve read the “About” page you know it’s from a poem I wrote a while ago but I’ve never shared the poem on here. I wrote the poem about 3:00 am one night last year when I couldn’t sleep because my mind was just wandering & doing its usual bit of simply THINKING too darn much. I wanted desperately to write about how I was feeling but the words just wouldn’t come. So I wrote a poem about not being able to write . . . and it worked! I don’t always get that lucky but I remember feeling so relieved after writing this poem because it restored my faith in myself as a writer & in general my faith that life, though difficult at times, is well worth the struggle.

I’ve written quite a few poems in my life & plan to share more of them on here in the future. I must say this one is one of my favorites because it really was a moment of catharsis for me when I wrote it, I suppose because to me it so perfectly describes how my mind feels so much of the time: lost in a thicket of musings, or in other words pondering entirely too many ideas at once so that it’s difficult for me to ever truly relax. And quite often when I try to verbalize all of these “musings,” whether in spoken conversation or in writing, I’m suddenly left quite speechless & unable to describe them at all. I also love that I was able to touch on several other important themes in my life including the desire to be a writer above all else, the desire to change or leave some important mark on the world, & the feeling that maybe I am really a bit crazy after all.

I started this blog mostly as a way for me to “vent” all of my ideas & feelings about life & in doing so to hopefully reduce my own stress & anxiety levels while also perhaps inspiring or encouraging others to do the same or to ponder the same questions I have about life. That is why I thought the title A Thicket of Musings was so fitting for this blog. To a certain extent I think my mind will always be caught in a thicket of musings because it’s just a part of my very nature to think, think, think about everything all the time. But I find that in writing I feel less lost in this proverbial thicket of musings & more capable of enjoying the process. Some days I feel certain I’d trade just about anything to just not THINK so much about everything but in my heart I know I belong in a thicket of musings & I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

What about you? Do you ever feel like you just can’t stop thinking about things? Like there are so many ideas swarming around in your head but you can’t actually pin down any of them? Do you ever wonder if you’re the only person to ponder certain things (even though logically you know with six billion or more people in the world that’s nigh impossible)? If so, join me in A Thicket of Musings today & let me know your strategies for dealing with these thoughts.

Ok, enough talk about it.  Here’s the poem:

I used to be able to write poems

Nothing great or fancy

Just short little ditties

That somehow healed the wounds in my soul

Which life inevitably brings

But now words never seem to come to me

I’m lost in a thicket of musings

That I can never quite define

If could be anything in the world

I’d be a writer

When I was in fifth grade that’s all I wanted

I wrote about it in my autobiography that year

But all the great ideas that are in my head

Never seem to make it onto paper

(Or since this is the digital age

Perhaps I should say the computer screen)

It’s 3:00 a.m. and I can’t sleep

My body is exhausted but my mind is wide awake

When I was a child I thought I’d be a failure in life

If I didn’t somehow become famous someday

But now I don’t envy celebrities of anything

I think their lives are mostly miserable

Nonetheless I won’t be satisfied

If I don’t leave a mark on this world somehow

Is it normal to wonder about such things at 3:00 a.m.?

Or even at all?

Or am I just as strange and crazy as I’ve always feared?

Ah, you see what I just did there?

I wrote a poem about not being able to write a poem

Maybe there is still hope after all

Good night . . .

Or is it good morning?