WHAT I LEARNED FROM BLOGGING
Posted July 21, 2023.
Est. Reading Time: 5 minutes.
Every other week I share tidbits of people’s stories.
I try to avoid summarizing people’s stories. Every person can tell their own story better than I can. And I find that by summarizing, stories become my versions. I still end up sharing what I want to talk about. That means magnifying mental health, trauma, disability, and performance much more than originally intended.
I went through my journal to put together a few excerpts. It sits on my bookshelf with the rest of my books, magazines, and newspapers. That way it’s easy to grab and write my thoughts. Over time I’ve forgotten the depth of intimacy my journal contains. There’s still no desire to keep it hidden either. Motivation is short lived. I like to make use of whatever I have at any moment.
I also stay away from structuring my journal too much. Once I add more rules to writing–like a need to reflect or track or recall–following the most important rule becomes harder. Just write. 10 to 30 minutes a day. About anything. Like I said, I like to make use of whatever is motivating me.
Today I’m sharing a little bit of what I’ve been up to these past few months. The idea came from reflecting on my summer break and preparing for my clinical internship. One of my favorite lessons in therapy is that making life changes or confronting unpleasant experiences are best done when life is relatively stable and predictable. Stability by itself does not guarantee resilience. Life can fall apart when least expected. Stability must be capable of handling new chaos. As the poet Oscar Wilde said, “Without order nothing can exist. Without chaos nothing can evolve.” So this summer I welcomed a little bit of chaos.
Two things I’ve been working on this summer are my relationship with food and my blogging. I’ll share more about my eating some other day. For now, here’s some thoughts taken from my journal about blogging.
Things come together piece by piece.
I didn’t close this blog after I went inactive last year. My expectations were high to begin with: I thought I had the perfect plan. One just to execute. One making use of the reading and writing already part of my life. Yet every website layout, every book, and every entry became part of trial and error. Some ideas never got tried. Eventually everything started to feel irrelevant. This was supposed to be an easy project. Yet my lifestyle was changing, and I was doing unexpected things. I wasn’t quite enjoying blogging anymore. I wasn’t sure if I should continue, but I didn’t want to quit either.
Truth is my blogging experience has been one of figuring things out. Figuring out what parts I enjoy and what parts I’m good at; these don’t always line up. Sometimes I enjoyed things I wasn’t good at. Like creating a visually appealing website and formatting my writing appropriately. Then, knowing what I was good at became harder to understand. Experience can humble you. When I first started, I felt good at writing, then decent, then lost. The problem is that being good at writing can get more specific: perhaps I am good at writing about certain topics or good at writing in certain formats. In the end, I felt that I was blogging to earn a degree in literature rather than blogging to share things I love.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised if this blog evolved into something different. The site is already different from what I created two years ago. And it’s definitely different from what I imagined as I thought about making it.
There’s never been a plan. I’ve been putting things together, figuring out the story for this site. Piece by piece. Or as Stephen King would say about stories, fossil by fossil,
Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same. No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it’s probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses.
Don’t confuse love and passion.
After the blogging stopped my reading and writing habits kept changing. I started picking up books about people I never thought would fascinate me. I imagined taking bits of their stories and putting them together in a new way. This felt worthwhile to me, and I felt others might feel the same way. No matter the story, I zoomed into things which felt special. The bits I saw myself magnifying. Blogging started to feel like something I could love doing again.
I’m still making changes to my life. I never used social media, but I started updating my Instagram; this happened after the blogging stopped but before I returned to it. The challenge of posting weekly has a familiar feeling: I decide what parts of myself to reveal; to know myself and know what to use. But presentation forces things together for its desired appearance.
All this to say that I feel passionate as I put things together. I find this feeling in many places. Like when I was figuring things out for the site. When I was putting parts of people’s stories together. I get this feeling in therapy too: trying to put things together and making sense of them. When I decided to become a therapist, I also chose something I could love doing; but passion wants to feel this love everywhere. I began to realize that love and passion expand in different ways.
Because of my blogging experience, I can relate to the people I read about. I made connections without living through their circumstances. Our experiences are different, but our feelings and emotions don’t change much: a person fascinated with animals becomes a biologist; a game developer was a lonely child; an overweight kid used to get bullied, now he’s an elite athlete. These circumstances make sense because they’re about what’s meaningful, looking to belong, and facing fears. I get passionate when I make these connections. Sometimes I get carried away and have to figure things out again. It’s the love for what I do that keeps me open minded but also anchored: the blogging; the therapy.
Passion races off to be lost in the moment. But love is in a hurry to grow and last. Love is more contagious than passion. As Paulo Coelho said, “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”