This is the first sentence of a new blog. (The first sentence is always the hardest to come up with, so, there, now it's out of the way.)
One of my habits is letting good habits die, getting sad about it, and bringing good habits back. Habitually. For a few years, a few years ago, I was writing. Like, kind of a lot. Journaling, blogging, writing academic papers. And then suddenly, or gradually, I stopped. I finished grad school, and people stopped making me write. My life got better, and it started being more fun to live it than to talk about it. Then parts of life got hard, and I didn't want to talk about it. I forgot that, for me, writing is part of living. It occurred to me the other day that I don't remember the last thing I wrote that wasn't a text message, a Facebook post, a work e-mail, or a grocery list. That made me sad. I thought, I'm not the kind of person who blogs anymore. Then I realized that I can be the kind of person who blogs again, if I start blogging again. Obviously. Wait, no, blogging is a little scary, it comes with unnecessary expectations and imaginary pressure and unwarranted self-criticism. But yes, because it's also fun sometimes, and even when it isn't fun, it's helpful. And fear is dumb. Most of my decisions that I've made based on fear have turned out less than awesome. There is no growth inside my comfort zone.
So I got online. I don't have to commit to this. Let me just see if I can choose a template, come up with an address, think of a name. I stared blankly at the field that said "title," wondering why it was so difficult to come up with a name for a new blog. I'd get ideas, but no, that one's too cheesy, that one doesn't mean anything, that one's too specific. This isn't even a big deal, let's stop making it difficult. What is this blog about? What is my life about? Do I even have anything to say? What even are words, anyway? Katie, you sort of suck at letting simple things be simple. Sorry. But, cute try. So I decided to be less intentional about finding a name, and instead just started listening to the words that went through my head, the words that came out of my boyfriend's mouth, the words in the movie we were watching. ("Extract". It was silly. We enjoyed it. Someone loses a testicle.) At one point, I was trying to express a thought but was struggling to find the right word. My boyfriend completed my sentence for me, and I said, "that's the word I was looking for." And there it was.
Seeking and finding. Not knowing what I've needed until I've gotten it. The frustration of being so close to understanding something, but not quite getting there. Getting help along the way. The satisfaction of discovery, the beauty in the expression of truth. The awesomeness of the fact that words both represent reality and shape it. The joy of words as tools. Words that represent concepts that are new to me, and, once I've discovered them, change the way I view life, and live it. Words that represent familiar concepts, but frame them in a new way, a way that makes things make a whole new level of sense. Words that aren't even real words, but need to be. Like "fauxstalgia," missing something that never existed, or didn't exist in the way you remember it. (Credit for that one goes to aforementioned very clever boyfriend.)
So, there you go. A whole blog post about the process of deciding to blog. We'll see what comes next.
One of my habits is letting good habits die, getting sad about it, and bringing good habits back. Habitually. For a few years, a few years ago, I was writing. Like, kind of a lot. Journaling, blogging, writing academic papers. And then suddenly, or gradually, I stopped. I finished grad school, and people stopped making me write. My life got better, and it started being more fun to live it than to talk about it. Then parts of life got hard, and I didn't want to talk about it. I forgot that, for me, writing is part of living. It occurred to me the other day that I don't remember the last thing I wrote that wasn't a text message, a Facebook post, a work e-mail, or a grocery list. That made me sad. I thought, I'm not the kind of person who blogs anymore. Then I realized that I can be the kind of person who blogs again, if I start blogging again. Obviously. Wait, no, blogging is a little scary, it comes with unnecessary expectations and imaginary pressure and unwarranted self-criticism. But yes, because it's also fun sometimes, and even when it isn't fun, it's helpful. And fear is dumb. Most of my decisions that I've made based on fear have turned out less than awesome. There is no growth inside my comfort zone.
So I got online. I don't have to commit to this. Let me just see if I can choose a template, come up with an address, think of a name. I stared blankly at the field that said "title," wondering why it was so difficult to come up with a name for a new blog. I'd get ideas, but no, that one's too cheesy, that one doesn't mean anything, that one's too specific. This isn't even a big deal, let's stop making it difficult. What is this blog about? What is my life about? Do I even have anything to say? What even are words, anyway? Katie, you sort of suck at letting simple things be simple. Sorry. But, cute try. So I decided to be less intentional about finding a name, and instead just started listening to the words that went through my head, the words that came out of my boyfriend's mouth, the words in the movie we were watching. ("Extract". It was silly. We enjoyed it. Someone loses a testicle.) At one point, I was trying to express a thought but was struggling to find the right word. My boyfriend completed my sentence for me, and I said, "that's the word I was looking for." And there it was.
Seeking and finding. Not knowing what I've needed until I've gotten it. The frustration of being so close to understanding something, but not quite getting there. Getting help along the way. The satisfaction of discovery, the beauty in the expression of truth. The awesomeness of the fact that words both represent reality and shape it. The joy of words as tools. Words that represent concepts that are new to me, and, once I've discovered them, change the way I view life, and live it. Words that represent familiar concepts, but frame them in a new way, a way that makes things make a whole new level of sense. Words that aren't even real words, but need to be. Like "fauxstalgia," missing something that never existed, or didn't exist in the way you remember it. (Credit for that one goes to aforementioned very clever boyfriend.)
So, there you go. A whole blog post about the process of deciding to blog. We'll see what comes next.
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