The little blog that couldn’t start
In other words, where I’ve been.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried this.
In March 2017, I declared that I’d be coming back to writing for good. I posted this announcement to my Facebook page, expecting that the fear of being shamed for failing my own challenge in public would be enough to motivate me.
Days went by, then weeks and months. I gave myself one break, then another. Before I realized it, I’d fallen back into the hole again.
It’s too easy to justify my own failures. To say that I was too busy with school and work to keep up with a blog.
It was an ironic excuse. Over the past two years of apparent silence, I started a freelance writing career. I wrote blog posts, letters, custom stories. I even ghostwrote a few short stories for Amazon publication.
In an odd way, the clarity was refreshing. I had deadlines to meet and clients to please. The creative burden never really weighed on me, but on the people I was writing for. My words were a vessel for their ideas. That was liberating because it meant I never had to show myself in my writing. In fact, the people I wrote for preferred that I didn’t.
And then there was another level of anxiety I was avoiding. Studying literature at a liberal arts college has been fulfilling, a perfect counterpoint to my miserable experience at a high school that didn’t value the arts. But when all of my high school classmates and family friends graduate with practical degrees from good universities, it became harder to justify choosing the arts over more readily employable skills.
When I wrote for pay, I could temporarily brush those anxieties aside. Look at me, making money with writing and translation. If people kept coming for my services, that must mean that my skills are valuable in some real way.
What “real” meant, I could never say.
I don’t regret doing the work I did for the past two years. What I do regret is stepping back from writing for myself out of fear.
The silence on this blog is not an empty one for me. Over the past two years I’ve struggled to draft blog posts. I’ve thrown away post after post for not being perfect. For being too unrelateable or too embarrassing. I come back to the blank slate week after week, only to leave in frustration.
I thought that if I could write for other people, writing for myself would become so much easier. It hasn’t, not the slightest bit. I still come back to the blank canvas of this blog and stare, wondering what I should do with myself.
Having an audience is nice. Having a clientele is profitable. Writing a weird, personal blog like this promises me neither of those things. But if I never write about the things I want to write about, then every single dollar I’ve made from my writing will be a complete waste.
I don’t know what to promise at this point. I’ve made the goal for myself to publish once a week (which might be a bit difficult with finals coming up). We’ll see if I make it.
I’ve never valued my own voice much in the past. But if I’m going to be honest, I do think there are some pretty cool things I can share. Sometimes they’re even kind of funny. And if anyone finds them useful, then that’s the best I could do.
