Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Words of wisdom

Right now is all kinds of good. It's nearing 5 am. The definition of "blogging every day" is getting looser and looser, but since I'm devoted to it, I've arisen from bed (and subsequent dreams of blog-writting in my head), to write this to you even if you never read it.

It may seem silly, this pact that I've made with myself. With the devil, actually (I am the devil in this scenario). But when I start something, I finish it. And even though this evening I went through several minutes of crying and considering never doing it again, I'm doing it anyway.

Why was I crying and trying to decide whether it was even worth it to go on?

Lately I've stopped feeling the spirit in me as a blog writer. In the beginning, this space was all about sharing new essays relating to various truths in my life. I always had new material because I had such a broad topic to work with: my own psyche.

But why don't you try writing about your thoughts every single day. Even if your mind is disturbingly hyperactive like mine, you'd be hard-pressed to think of new and insightful non-fiction prose to create and share each evening. And that's not even factoring in the amount of time it takes just to put those words into action. Because the thought alone isn't enough. You are responsible for constructing coherent sentences that relay the information in your head to a reader. What an arduous tasks for each evening around 11 pm. And what an even more confusing concept on a jumbled mind at 5 am.

These were the thoughts running through my head earlier this evening, but even so I was pleased to receive the encouragement that I should keep going despite adversity.

A lot of my anxiety about this blog has stopped coming from myself and started coming from the readership. I've contemplated no longer posting links to it on my Facebook out of fear of being ridiculed. There is a constant nagging feeling in me that I must censor myself.

A bit of censorship isn't a bad thing. It can keep you grounded when you feel like going off on tangents about any particular subject. Because not all ideas are offense-free. In the same way, however, pretty much every topic will garner someone's offense.

And even if the blog itself is not designed to this effect, there will always be that person who simply enjoys being offended for no reason other than their own subconscious sadistic pleasure (or displeasure, or some measure of both).

I have no way of accounting for the feelings of others. I can't anticipate them entirely. I can guess and I can try to predict and as a result change my way of addressing issues to appease the small public I've acquired for these writings. But how am I supposed to do that and maintain an honest place for my own ideas?

Originally when I started here, I thought it would be all about me. Maybe if I had never started sharing my daily entries, it would be that way. But when you include people in your daily thoughts, you are subject to their praise and their scrutiny. And the latter comes in droves without fail.

Yet I'd like to go from here, from a position of defensiveness brought on by an early-morning anxiety and then inspiration, to a place of humility.

Because despite considering these blogs to be a place solely for myself, the way things have developed has taught me something wonderful about the world - specifically the one I live in today.

I am surrounded by people who are ready media-absorbers. This is the reason for the existence of Facebook at all. We, as a society, can appreciate having the constant ability to be in touch with our peers via online social media.

And in being so, we become fascinated with the lives of others. Like looking through a microscope at some other world a far cry from our own, we take some solace in the presence of another's opinion - even if we hate it.

It burns me to the core that I have the ability to hurt or offend other people. Since I was born, I've always been a people-pleaser. In elementary school I used to hate turning my "card" to yellow, blue or red because it indicated that I had upset my teacher in some fashion. I always wanted to be the goody-two-shoes, the reliable one, the good kid.

That title has served me well so far.

But in this way, maybe it's my time to be taught the lesson of why goody-two-shoes isn't always the right path. If you're honest with yourself and with others, you might actually find more variety and more meaning in life.

This argument has nothing to do with the concept of "YOLO" (or, "you only live once"). In this day and age I feel like I'm always fighting modern clichés, but this essay has absolutely nothing to do with this all-too-obvious fact of life.

What I am to project is a question of pleasing others versus pleasing yourself. I've spent so long going along with expectations of me. But I must realize that having this blog at all is a departure of expectations. It's why every single time I post an entry I feel like I might be annoying people. In recent months I've even hesitated adding people on Facebook because I don't want them to think I'm a freak for posting a blog a day and sending out a link to my "friends."

But yeah, I'll admit that this is about myself. I don't mean that in a self-absorbed way, and hopefully it doesn't come off that way. Yet still I maintain the idea that a blog is a personal space, a journal is a valuable tool for self-expression and while the masses may be reading these things, that should never get you down.

Words of wisdom for the evening/morning? Check.

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