Wow. So my new found resolve and sunny disposition lasted a full...maybe 8 hours. Tossed by the wayside in record time. I hate feeling the way I do right now and I know getting it out won't help me this time but I have to get it out anyway.
Writing is my outlet. I write every single day, whether it's a couple of lines or five pages. If something pops into my head that I need to get down I stop whatever I'm doing and I write. When life gets overwhelming, I write. Most of my posts (including this one) start out in one of my many notebooks and they might have always stayed there if not for the invention of the blog. Curiously, I've never been able to keep an actual old school journal. I've started many over the years but always either got bored with them or wrote in so many different notebooks that I couldn't keep my entries in order. Enter my first ever blog when I was in college. I read back some of what I wrote back then and it's all terrible. Just pointless little college kid banter. But it was the first time I was ever able to actually keep a journal for more than a month. Then life moved on and I stopped blogging and went back to my stack of notebooks. "This newfangled blogging thing won't catch on, it's just a phase," I said (that's right, I say 'newfangled' as if I'm an old man).
By 2007 life had moved on to a very bad place and a friend suggested I start a new blog as a way of venting when I was upset. By then I was willing to do anything to try and shake my self-destructive tendencies and thus a blog was born. And I genuinely enjoy writing here and it really is the best outlet I have. It's a place where I can go and get out everything and anything I'm feeling and there's no judgement or criticism. My blog is public and honestly I have no idea who reads it but I don't care. I've realized the reason I could never stick to a traditional journal is because it wasn't enough to just get it out on paper. I needed more. It's liberating in some way to put it all out there to the universe and let whomever stumbles upon these pages read them. I'm not writing words in a notebook and setting it aside on a shelf to collect dust. I'm getting everything completely out now. I've always believed that words are meant to be read.
Having said all that, words are also my downfall sometimes. I wrote a letter to someone I care about and sat with it for awhile. Then I sent it on, words are meant to be read after all, and they read it and I felt good about it. But later on we talked about what I'd written and I was a little thrown by some of the reaction I received. I also may have misinterpreted some of what they were trying to say and I internalized my feelings about it and the conversation spiraled to a negative place. I am my harshest critic when it comes to...well, everything really but I can be especially self-conscious about my writing. Writing here for the world (or, let's be honest, probably about five people) to see is different cuz I'm not actually writing to anyone. But writing how you feel about someone and knowing they're gonna read every word puts you in a VERY vulnerable position. So at the first sign of a possibly bad reaction I retreated and closed off and away went my openness. For the past hour or so I've felt sick about my vulnerability in that letter. I've felt awkward and weird about how things may be between the sendee and I in the morning (I still do). But now I also feel bad about having lost the openness I was so excited to have re-acquainted myself with today.
