Reality Check
June 16, 2008
It’s 10 o’clock on a Monday night.
I’m sitting here watching Unbeatable Banzuke on G4 with the husband and Twittering a bit… thinking about going to bed early and actually sleeping a full night…
Then I realize that I’m also actively avoiding thinking about my blog. That’s because it’s sitting here, mocking me with the fact that I promised myself I’d write today and didn’t.
Yes, yes… it mocks me. What? Your blog doesn’t mock you? It doesn’t sit there calling you a sissy because you can’t spend a few minutes typing to get something from inside your brain out there into the world? Hm. Maybe I need to lighten up on the allergy medications.
Honestly, though… I resolved over the weekend to turn over a new leaf when it comes to this blog. I need to quit having half-written impulse drafts sitting around waiting for me to finish them. I need to write something other than “um… I’ll write something soon.” I need to realize that this is MY blog, not the other way around. I can bend it to my will. I can use it to communicate and to expound and to ruminate!! (Take that thesaurus!) I just have to quit being afraid of it.
That’s right, I just admitted that I’m afraid of my own blog.
Before you start wondering if you should contact GeekDaddy and see about getting me a psych-eval for the voices in my head and fear of inanimate/virtual objects, let me explain.
When I started this, I didn’t know what I really wanted from it. I’ve blogged regularly for 8 years. This was just another arena to me. But I’m finding that I want to actually craft this. I want it to be something worth reading when my friends and random strangers click thru to it. And in order to do that, I need to start writing for real. Not just tossing off a post every so often to keep from feeling guilty or to blow off steam.
And that means that I need to start living up to my blogging potential – and I always get this chill up my spine when someone uses the phrase “living up to my potential” – I see myself as 70-something, living alone, mad as a hatter with a bunch of cats… and there’s someone shaking their head and ‘tsk tsk’ing as they say “she never really did live up to her potential.”
So yeah. I suffer from performance anxiety like everyone else – but I describe it a bit differently than you might.
Doesn’t excuse me from following though with my resolution. I’m planning on implementing sort of a ‘batch processing’ system as described here on problogger.net but in my own usual scattered kind of way. I would’ve started today, except that I was “batch processing” the grocery shopping instead.
I’m trying to implement a number of changes in my life simultaneously. Yes, I know they say it doesn’t work as well that way, but it’s the only way it’s ever worked for me. Change everything at once rather than putting anything off. So I’ll be blogging more regularly and hopefully with more of a focus… I’ll be attempting yet again to lose weight and get in shape. Unfortunately, I’ve got further to go with that than I did last year at this time – but that’s another post. I’ll be working on a number of opportunities that I hope will be leading me in a direction I want to go careerwise once Buttercup is back in school.
I hope you’ll continue to join me as I throw all the knives up in the air and hope I can juggle them successfully without too much bleeding… if anything, it should be interesting to watch.
So I’ll see you tomorrow… which is, after all, the first day of the rest of our lives.
