Before the beginning of 2018, I kind of swore to myself that I would be less ‘lazy’ and more ‘proactive’ (read on to find out why these are in quotes) about the blog.
For the past year, I’ve been struggling a little with what to write, how to write, and how much to write. Well, not just a little actually, but quite a lot. Truth be told, writing, to me, is something very personal. Laying my thoughts out in the open public – naked and bare – on a place called the Internet, is way beyond my comfort zone.
When I launched the blog last May, I had plenty of ideas of what I was going to write. I had just left my full-time job to pursue something new, and was in a transition phase – I still am – in my life. I wanted to use the blog as a therapy space and a place for personal reflection.
Executing those ideas and actually getting down to it, however, was harder than I thought.
It was hard to blog without revealing tidbits from my personal life. I found myself hitting the ‘delete’ bar more than I wrote. I simply wasn’t sure how much to delve into my personal life, and being a very very private person (the proposal post took me a lot of courage), I struggled.
Nonetheless I still tried to write something from time to time. I didn’t want the blog to become another one of those things I started and gave up in less than 6 months.
I knew I had to make blogging become a habit. Otherwise it would become a chore, and what would be the point then?
After some time of asking myself why writing was so painful, it hit me. I was more anxious than I was ‘lazy’ about the blogging. I wasn’t ‘proactive’ about writing posts because I was essentially avoiding the discomfort it caused me.
Welcome to the world of anxiety.
Since the start of 2018, I’ve tried on multiple occasions to write about this. Today, I bravely write about this and am proud to say I finally publish this post with peace of mind. However brief it may be, it is a first step towards honest reflection.
It is and will be a growing process. I’ve recently started reading a book called ‘Emotional Agility’. It tells of how we tend to accept thoughts and feelings as facts and act on these ‘facts’. We’ve been conditioned to mark unpleasant feelings such as anger, sadness, anxiety as ‘negative’, and are often told to ‘think positive’ when really, the mind just doesn’t work that way. It’s an interesting read. It tells that the search for happiness is misleading. We place so much pressure upon ourselves to always be happy, but that only makes it so much more stressful.
Maybe things don’t always have to be great, and that’s OK.
For now, I’m glad I stuck with the blog, and will attempt to blog frequently, more regularly, and freely.
xx
Bunny de coco