Well, I finally set down the cross-stitch, and I'm back at the keyboard. Self-awareness is, in my experience, not so much a gradual climb ever spiraling upward. Instead, it's craggy and unpredictable and marked by periods of blissful ignorance, nonsensical frustration, and whiplash paradigm shifts.
I started this blog with some very intense goals in mind. Write another novel. Write meaningful, personal blog entries that would someday make a surprisingly best-selling memoir. Give my life a grander sense of purpose and really achieve my potential. There's nothing wrong with wanting these things - but I didn't realize how starkly this experiment would reveal/revive a long-standing inner turmoil.
When I was in second grade, I think my teacher thought I was a genius. She was convinced I should be a neurosurgeon, because that was the most money you could make for being so smart. Unfortunately, I don't think she kept this opinion to herself very well, which felt really good but made my social life and personal neuroses a bit more uncomfortable. I also won a 'young writer' competition that year I think, which felt like such a dreamy future destiny. So now there were things to live up to, for me and those around me.
The summer after my freshman year at BYU, I got really really bored. I missed school, the work and the friends. So I decided to take a Philosophy class at the local community college. Clearly it would be easier than BYU, and I would go blow them away with my fabulous writing and insights and take home easy credits. The most vivid detail I can recall is that the professor had a long beard and bushy eyebrows, but no hair on his arms or legs. I listened but didn't really engage, read but didn't study. When I got my first, short assignment back, it bore the first 'D' I had ever received in my up-to-then-stellar scholastic career. I dropped the class and never went back.
Identities forged by suggestions and praise tend to harden into a crust when we wear them long enough - and 'smart girl' and 'future writer' gave me social anxiety blisters rather than the better, truer feeling of being seen. I've been learning to stop 'hustling for worthiness' (a Brené Brown phrase) and embrace the messy imperfection in my life and self, but it's still a process, and I still have plateaus and ditches and many more hills to climb.
So it was with this blog, and those aspirations above. Wanting to use my voice and share my thoughts turned into watching the number of page views and Facebook likes with a bit too much fervor. I don't think anyone sets out to do what they want without encountering plenty of lessons on what they don't want. One thing I've learned is that I want to be content and pleased with my own small, personal life. I have to fully embrace my own home and family and community and self in a way that may leave less time and energy for the bigger and grander versions of myself - it was a tremendous relief to hold this blog and what it represents to me a bit more loosely.
I'm not going away - I will still write here a few times a month. But I think I will probably be more thoughtful about what I write, instead of obsessing over how often I write, and how popular that writing is. Let me just write to you, my friends, and share my little corner of life with you. That's what I really care about, anyway.
