Where to start

I'm afraid I may be losing my voice. Or forgetting what it sounds like. I don't know if it's the symptoms of a early midlife crisis, a side effect of finishing my first year of college and finding that I am no pearl among peas, or just another notch in a long string of insecurities that I have about myself. Maybe I'm just remembering wrong. But I don't remember always being this unsure of myself when it came to writing. Have I always hesitated for ten or fifteen minutes between words? Have I always been this easily distracted? Have my ideas always run dry three or four sentences into the first paragraph?

Writers are supposed to get better as they go, not more fearful and uncertain of themselves. And so I have started this blog in the hopes of somehow recovering a sense of confidence in my ability to express myself, and to somehow cultivate the ideas that mushroom ever so ephemerally in my head. Maybe this type of confessional writing, free from the restrictions and pressures of a paper that has been left too late, is just the thing I need.

The problem is, although I've spent the past several days clicking through endless blogs and reading about everything from African ingenuity to The Perfect Grandson, I can't seem to grasp what a blog is supposed to look, sound, or feel like. In my rovings across the internet, I have encountered voices and textures of all sorts. And perhaps in trying to condense into a sentence or two what a blog is "supposed" to be, I am missing the point. All too easily, I have once again fallen into the trap of marking out my boundaries before I've even begun. While Wordsworth claims that "nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room," maybe the "weight of too much liberty" will be good for me. Maybe this time the way to go is to simply to sit back and write, and see where the tide will take me.

(picture above title taken from http://loish.deviantart.com/gallery/#/doalbf)