This Is Me

I’m going to try something different with my blog. For months, my blog has felt like a place where I had to try to say something important, in a sense. Something that could maybe attract readers beyond my group of Facebook friends. It didn’t work. Instead, I lost interest in writing here every night, and that felt unfair to me. Every morning I would pour through my Metrics and feel great when my subscribers went up or really sad when they went down. Sorry, but my blog isn’t really for my (lack of) readers. It’s for me. It’s for me to try things, to succeed, to fail, to learn, and to write better.

I don’t care if my posts aren’t coherent or well-structured or well-written or proofread to shit. I don’t think short-term with many things, but I was thinking about the short-term with this blog. Like I wrote above, every entry had to be good, and that meant sacrificing sleep and in the end, quality and honesty. I’ve been writing in here on a nightly basis for 193 days straight. I honestly don’t know if I’ve improved as a writer or just got really good at writing bullshit. But 193 days from now? One year from now?

I want to look back at all these entries and see my progress. I want to get better. That’s been a big theme of this blog since the very beginning. I’m writing more now than I’ve ever written in my life. Just to restate my habits: write my novel in the morning, write my novel after work, journal about my novel, journal about some personal things, journal about three things I was grateful for today, and write a blog post. All that is over 2,000 words spread across six different sessions. And I still don’t think I write enough and I still want to write more.

I really believe the work I’m doing now on this blog will produce something really good down the line. I’m learning by writing these entries every night. I’m showing up and doing the work. I really want to write well-written and very personal essays. That seems really fun to me. That seems like I something I know I can do and that I want to do. I like writing about myself. I like writing about my life. I like learning something new about myself through writing. At the same time, I don’t spend any time really trying to produce something that I spent my time on. All these entries are written in about an hour, most times less than that. A lot of that time was spent thinking about what to write about, and the longer I took, the worse the product seemed to be.

I gave myself an arbitrary limit of 500 words because that seemed to me like enough time for me to say something about my day. Sometimes I go way over that when I really shouldn’t have. Other times I could’ve cut out a lot and not have reached it. Those are the times when I wished I could go back and add and revise and improve my product. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do that while I’m on this path toward 365 daily entries. One missed night will kill me.

Another thing about all these entries are the titles. Sometimes I copy/paste a line or a word that I wrote about in the entry and move on. Other times the title just comes to me, and I like those. Most of the time, though, I just toss something up there without much thought. Fewer entries will definitely help me out there. Not today, though.

For the longest time I didn’t know if I wanted to continue paying for a blog past the one year mark. Now I really think like I should. I really want to, and I’m going to. This is my place. My name is up at the very top for the world to see because I’m not afraid of who I am. This is me and this is my life. I don’t need validation. I need to revise and make my shit better.

Not tonight, though. Tonight I want to sleep.