150. Writing My Way Through — Connor Toomey
Photo by Kate Speer
I have picked up and put down the practice of writing for the better part of two decades, always for different reasons.
I have picked up and put down the practice of writing for the better part of two decades, always for different reasons.
As a child, I journaled because I wanted a record of what I was feeling. I wanted to be able to look back decades later and observe my younger self. In my early twenties, as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic, I wrote monthly blog entries to catalogue my experience. Later, I tried my hand at short stories, but was thwarted by writer’s block. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the time, energy, or inspiration to do justice to the complex, extraordinary characters as they appeared in my mind.
Lately I have been struggling with turbulent moods that at times cloud the horizon. This is partly caused by my demanding work schedule—I’m a platoon leader in the U.S. Army, and it’s an all-consuming, no-days-off job—and partly from heartbreak. At the outset of the pandemic, a childhood crush I wrote about in my early journals became something more, and it felt like two strands of a circle coming together in a special twist of fate. But the childhood friend and I called it quits this past fall. And so I have started writing once again.
This time I am taking it slower: one half-hour journal entry a day. Now I write to try and make sense of my emotions, to process what I am going through. I am discovering this is perhaps the best possible reason to write: For yourself.
— Connor Toomey
