Day one: Decide to finally set up a blog (like husband has been bugging me to for years). Decide not to tell husband. Feel both good and not-good about both decisions.
Day two: Forget all passwords to everything. *sigh* Post about setting up blog, just to shake off the first-post jitters. Table decision on whether to mention blog to therapist. Also table any consideration of why you would not mention blog to therapist wherever appropriate and whether it is slightly hipster/too-too-much to mention therapist in first blog post.
Let me tell you a story.
Once, a long time ago, a little girl really liked writing. She did it on her own, for fun, and didn’t care too much if other people liked it. They liked it anyway, for the most part. Or didn’t care, in a way that was totally fine by her. She got As, she won contests, she won awards.
At some point, the fun began to leak out of writing. She wasn’t sure what had caused the leak. Maybe it was her father’s complete lack of interest in anything she was good at that he wasn’t. Maybe it was the blandness of her mother’s ‘It’s very nice’ when said mother read the longest, most intricate story she’d ever written. Maybe it was something else.
The leak grew. The girl became an adult. She doubted that people liked her writing, that she was good at it. She doubted the usefulness of it even if she was good at it. She doubted the long-term value of writing as a lifetime pursuit, even if it might be useful to someone.
She was full of doubt but not so much fun.
Still, though, the stories were inside, pressing to get out. She took a creative writing class to fill a requirement. When her personal world imploded and took her confidence and her career plan with it, she took another one, because she needed it. She tried not think about what that might mean. And then she graduated and stopped writing.
Writing required thinking and time and confidence. Thinking was painful and time was scarce and confidence was vacationing Somewhere Else. She took in other stories, consuming and consuming – books, television, movies, songs, articles, blogs – but tried not to produce anything of her own. What few things that escaped were hidden away and she pretended they did not exist.
Sometimes, she pretended she did not exist.
…
One day, she decided to finally set up a blog. She decided not to tell her husband. And to try not to think about any whys for awhile. Because sometimes… sometimes you have to jump in.
swirthit 