HELLO, MY NAME IS SUSAN, AND I AM A WORD-AHOLIC.

Hello.  My name is Susan, and I have a confession to make.  I am a Word-aholic.


I don't know how it happened.  One word at a time, I guess.  But now my life is a mess; littered with split infinitives and dangling participles, raw vowel sounds and harsh invectives secretly stashed behind every tentative idea.  I want to stop, but I can't.

For years I had it under control; or so I thought.  I could sit for a brief stint at my journal then walk a way  without thinking much more about it.  But as time passed, I saw myself slipping into obscurity after a long, suppressed life of manageable, moderately recorded, verbal sobriety;  and I began to feel invisible.  Even to myself.

Oh, I had my family, my dogs, my artwork; but they were not enough.  Nothing was ever enough.  So, when I reached that point when my life appeared to be on the wane rather than full of promise, and my bouts with dissatisfaction came with more frequency and heightened levels of abject despair, I began hitting the words with much more regularity.  In fact, I couldn't go a day without hitting them.  It became an obsession.

Suddenly, I would find myself trolling the internet in search of linguistic content and literary sustenance in which to drown my repressed articulations and frustrations.....in the middle of the afternoon!


I couldn't help myself.

It is not something I am proud of and I feel such shame every time I think about the many journals I have; their pages stuffed with adjectives and verbs and countless run-on sentences, hidden under my bed.  I don't use them much, but I think about them all the time, and it is a comfort knowing they are there just in case I need a fix in the middle of the night.

Until a few months ago I had everything on a manageable frequency, and very few people were even aware I had a problem.  I was able to remain in my studio and work on my paintings or drawings or my mixed media pieces of found objects and copper wire for a few hours everyday before my compulsion to write drew my attention back to my journal or my laptop by early evening.

But that all changed when I decided to create a website for my artwork.  It was supposed to be a selling platform for my creative endeavors and for a few poems ONLY.  I swear!  I had no intention of becoming enslaved by my thirst for words or falling off the wagon any further than I already was inclined to do.

However, it was suggested to me by a few people who seemed to know a good deal about websites and e-commerce that I start a blog right away, before the website was even finished, in order to perhaps create a small following and draw attention to the site when it finally appeared.  I had never really considered blogging or even specifically knew what one consisted of, but I was desperate to hold my life together and attempt to cloak my increasing inner-dependency on words, so I complied.

That was when everything first began to fall apart.  It was the beginning of the end, and in a very short time I realized I had a serious addiction that I could not conquer through willpower alone.

Not being a hugely proficient computer-phile, I found a user-friendly blog site at e-blogger.com.  It seemed innocent enough and I was quickly able to design my homepage and figured out how to upload images of my artwork onto each post, which gave me the false assurance that I was still maintaining a healthy balance and honoring both my passions, the art as well as the writing, since I could justify each post with an appropriate illustration.

I even added a link from my website right to the blog, so that whomever wanted could have access to the entire me and see that I was not concealing anything; therefore, I could not have a problem.  Right?  It was a terrific foil.  I even duped my own conscience.

For a while emptying my words into those blogs was enough, but it wasn't long before it became obvious that readership on this particular site was difficult to attract and sustain and that my 'followers' consisted mainly of my mother, a few of supportive friends (still in ignorance as to my 'problem') and an odd spattering of random strays who found their way to my page by mistake or out of curiosity.  ( And a goodly portion of those came from other countries leaving me wondering if they even could even read English.)

Eventually, I added a statistics counter to the blog so that I could track how many visitors viewed the posts and see which entries they favored or how many times they returned for more views.  Of course,  this strategy only further fueled my addiction and increased my compulsion to share my words with others.  No one wants to write alone.  'Misery loves company,' you know; and as long as a handful of readers showed up to drink in my words, I was compelled to provide them with more.

Soon all of my convoluted schemes at trying to appear in control began to unravel because it wasn't long after initiating the first few posts in this new world of the blogosphere that I began thinking ONLY about what I was going to write next or slaving for an unconscionable length of time in rapt effort carving, culling, expurgating, crafting and parsing every entry I wrote; often spending upwards of six or seven hours just on ONE piece!  You'd think I was in the running for the Pulitzer, my passion was that highly charged!

By the time my art website was operational, it was already too late for me.  I was drowning in a dictionary of words and eagerly bailing them onto the paint-splattered screen of my little macbook as fast as my shaky fingers could scan the keys.  I could have cared less about the website and thought only about he next bundle of creative nouns that could spice up my increasingly abnormal dependency on semantics.

I've already taken much criticism from my husband and my youngest child (the only one remaining at home but within weeks of leaving for culinary school two states away!) who've noticed and become resentful of my chronically distracted state and the frequency with which I tiptoe off to another room or a quiet corner of the house where I feverishly indulge my out-of-control dance with my own internal dialogue as it falls from my mind onto the screen of my trusty macbook.

How many times in the past couple of months have they casually walked into my studio and caught me hunched over my drawing table in a deep, linguistic trance, frantically thumbing my way toward just the right word in my wretchedly overused thesaurus?  All around me are just-begun paintings, half-done illustrations and a work table littered with un-consigned ephemera just waiting for my impaired focus to finally shift and complete the picture of a well-ordered life of bohemian enterprise.

My reaction to their intrusive insertion into my word-funded revelry is immediate denial.  I will nervously slam closed my laptop, concealing my guilty indulgence and when queried as to my actions, I reply only that I was checking my email or tracking an order on Amazon.  Then I casually mop the perspiration from my graying hairline and mechanically begin plotting the next set of fabricated circumstances that will provide me the soonest opportunity to resume my wordy intoxication.

I have even recently invested in a lager purse to accommodate my laptop, which I now cannot be parted from for more than an hour before my normally sedate countenance becomes visibly wracked by the perpetual lusting in my brain to convert basic prose to iambic pentameter at any time of the day or night!

Is it genetic?  Possibly.  My father was an English major at Dartmouth, after all; and my mother has an elegant fluency with language that is obviously above par.  And one of my brothers has had an on-again/off-again collusion with verbosity;  however, when last I heard, he was squarely reformed.  So,  as far as I am aware, no one in my immediate family struggles with this same disproportionate preoccupation and highly-charged, chronic dependency on literary expression.

I am the sole possessor of this unfortunate depravity.

It has taken control of my life.  Even right now, as the morning is only minutes away from becoming afternoon,  I am sitting in front of this cyber template filling the frustratingly small box with my HTML composition and completely putting aside the fact that I have yet to clean the house, workout on that damned elliptical (which, anymore has become merely another conduit for thought, an incubator of words and ideas for future blogs rather than the means to sustain balance between body and soul, as I  frequently dive off into a pool of compositional promise sometimes in excess of two hours!); and my morning shower must necessarily be now deferred to late afternoon once I reconcile the time lost.
Of course, there is still the matter of how to compensate for my afternoon obligations, which now also are at risk of being extracted altogether from today's agenda.

And for what?  All for the sake of WORDS!

Can I stop?  Do I want to?  The answer to both is a resounding NO!  Particularly now that I have fortuitously stumbled onto the Open Salon site and discovered that I am not alone; that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other blessedly obsessed Word-aholics who have both given themselves permission to live life in that state as well as to support one another through the blissful and sometimes torturous process of exorcising their demons of thought and emotion into concise and thoughtful verbiage recorded for all to partake and process.

It is a glorious literary and very real consortium of candid and captivating word-aholics that inspires, consoles, humors and satiates the need of all there to remain visible to and ineffably connected with one another in the highest and best possible sense through the language of their own unique and perfect souls.

It is the Salvation Army for the terminally verbose, and I am saved.

My deep and profound thanks to Scanner and J.D., Catherine, LittleKate, Thoth, CrankyCuss, JustCathy, Fred, and to all those of you only time now prevents me from listing who, in the short space of a few days, have welcomed me into this special circle of essential trust through the rare, genuine and gentle bond we all share in our precious addiction to Words.

I can't think of a more profoundly inspirational substance to abuse.

Cheers!