As New Year’s Resolutions go, this one has lasted longer than any other I’ve ever made. And at only 70 days, I’m feeling the claustrophobia, the resentment, the bitter coppery taste of now-daily rationalizations for not writing: it’s getting old.

I don’t know what is getting older–the dull edge of drudgery to write and post every day, or the knowledge that ONCE AGAIN, I’m losing interest or motivation to do something that is probably good for me.

Tonight I sat down and thought “Jeez, everyone is writing such interesting, funny, deep and amazing posts. And I’ve got nothing. Nothing.” For a few minutes, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

I’ve long since discarded the writing I did in high school and college, the compositions, the journals, the notes I made. I’ve exterminated the working comp journals for my creative writing class, where the instructor, an eccentric poet who sidelined as a tree surgeon, wrote in the margin of page five “This is the best sentence I’ve read in YEARS.” That same journal, full of my best efforts at prose and introspection for a captive audience, provoked other comments in the margins: “Excellent!” and then “I love this thought…expand on this!” and then, over time, “Yes, but what KIND of necktie?” or “This is incomplete. You can do better.”

I remember reading those words on the page, and feeling the wunderkind gloss fade from my pen. I remember in 8th grade that one of the teachers told me he thought I was the best writer he’d ever taught. I remember a Comp and Lit teacher in high school looking up from one of my stories and saying to me “Have you ever thought of becoming a writer?” I also remember later that year when he pointed out flaws and inconsistencies in my writing and how I lost my momentum and began to resent him.

In college, my first year, I had an instructor who made us turn in our papers with a cassette tape that he would dictate his commentary into. Our papers would be returned with the grade at the top, all commentary to be listened to on a small plastic cassette tape, cued up and ready. I had written about my family, about people I imagined, about my life. I remember listening to the tape each week, hearing his thoughtful voice talk to me about my writing. I was eighteen years old, and it was an amazing feeling to have a college professor tell me, albeit not to my face, that he thought I would make a fine writer.

So when I took the class from the eccentric poet, the sophomore Creative Writing course, I felt that I had something to offer. The first day of class, he looked over the roster and his eyes fell on my distinctive German last name. “Are you related to Robert and Steven and Gary?” he asked. I closed my eyes and said “They’re my brothers.” He began regaling the class with tales of my brothers, who had been his students back in the day when he had taught at our local junior high school before he got his doctorate and began teaching college English. I gritted my teeth and sat silently through it.

Later, he apologized for it; I had written about trying to be my own person in the journal we had to keep and turn in every week, and he spoke to me in the hallway after class to tell me it had been wrong of him to compare or contrast me with my brothers. “I read your class journal and realized I had decided something about you without getting to know you.”

It was this journal that became littered with his scrabbled commentary in blue ball point pen, his “comments” on my daily record of life, years before blogs had ever been thought of. As time went by in the course, his expectations of the class began to increase, and his expectations of me seemed to increase even more. I would write something that a classmate would have earned an “A” for, and get a B or C+ grade. “You can do better!” he would say. “I thought you were serious about this!”

One day in class, we were talking about families. He mentioned knowing my parents, and the fact that he had seen them at happy hour downtown the night before. I made a snide comment about how great it was that my teacher knew my dad, the barfly. He pounced on that remark and lambasted me before the class.

“Don’t you dare talk about your parents that way! They’re the salt of the earth!”

My heart pounded in my ears. My chest tightened. I sat there, my mouth wide open, my face hot, the rest of the class staring at me. I sat up in my seat and stared down at my notebook. Finally, in the silence, I looked up and said “Don’t pretend you know them because you talk to them in a bar. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t say about them. You don’t know a thing about it.”

It was nearing the end of the semester and after that day, he stopped commenting in my journal, which became from that point on my perfunctory set of lists, shallow observations of my surroundings, or pointed descriptions of family life to reinforce my point to him that he didn’t know a thing about people he considered to be salt of the earth. My mid-semester A grade would be slipping, I knew. When grades came out, though, I was horrified to see a “C” in Creative Writing. I hadn’t had a C in anything in five years.

I didn’t finish college; I left after that semester, got married, and moved away. I also didn’t write another thing, besides Christmas newsletters or missives to family or friends, for the next 19 years. I kept a journal for the first year PC and I were married, but destroyed it later because it was so depressing. It was filled with nothing more than laments about how I couldn’t write, and how Dr. McE—- had called me out and exposed me as a fraud.

Looking back, I realize that he was a teacher, nothing more. He was one voice among many and that my thin skin had been to blame more than anything. He was a reader, an opinion, a voice of reason, an admirer and a critic. But what he had to say wounded me so much that I lost all confidence in myself.

This blog has been my path back. The posts I’ve written, all 174 up to tonight, have been like my Creative Writing journal: some finished pieces, some notes, some observations. When I begin to slack off, I find the blog to be like Dr. McE—: something to resent, something to stare at and think “Jeez, what a fraud I am.”

But occasionally, it is my outlet for things I think need to be said, things I think I can say well. So for now, I am continuing, even though the daily posting is often burdensome. I have 19 years of silence to make up for, and even though I know I can do better…well, for now, this is good enough.