Starting Again – Day 1 of 31

For over two years, I blogged every single day. It became a rhythm and, in some ways, part of who I was. In conversation, I tried to make it come up. I wanted people to know how cool I was because I blogged so much. Of course, in my head, I knew that people really couldn’t care less about how many days I blogged or even if I blogged at all. Well, with the exception of a select few who knew what a challenge this truly was. Even then, those people have a slight moment of awe, but only because of a feeling of self-doubt on their side. They still don’t really care about my accomplishment.

We see things through the lens of caring about ourselves and our own accomplishments. Rarely do we actually care about what other people do. Instead, we care about how we can make ourselves look around what they have done.

Whether people have done good or bad things, we see that through the light of ourselves. Someone shoots a great shot in basketball and makes it. You have a few options in responding. A couple of them are:

1. We tell them it was a lucky break and it won’t happen again because we want them to realize that we are a superior athlete
2. We tear them down for bad form on the shot so that we can feel more experienced and feel some power of them
3. We congratulate them for a great shot so that they, and the others around us, like us better and know we’re a nice person
4. We don’t say anything because we don’t want to say something that makes people think we’re rude, but we also don’t want to say something nice that will encourage them and potentially cause them to make more points

Out of all of these, the focus is still on us. It’s always on ourselves. Out of this list, which is not exhaustive, you could potentially draw the conclusion that the last one is about what they feel and not what we feel, but is it? In reality, why don’t we want them to make more points? Because if they make more points, they might win, which in turn causes you to look like more of a loser instead of a winner. If ever we were to say the phrase “I can’t win,” this would be a most appropriate time.

All that to say, no one really cared about my blogging, but part of the reason I did it was because of how it made me feel when people would ooh and ah at the number when I told them how much I blogged. I loved the little hit of brain drugs I got when I was encouraged in that way.

Long story short, I stopped. It would be a lie to say because of the above reason. This has been a conclusion I have come to since I stopped. In reality, I got married and have been learning how to live life as a married person and until now, it didn’t feel like it made sense to continue blogging. I had much more important things to focus my time on.

But, I’ve missed it. I’ve realized that my thoughts have gotten lazier. I think of things throughout the day that are interesting, things I would have used to have had to think through more while blogging about them, but instead, I don’t blog about them so I never fully think through them and I allow the thoughts and ideas to slip through.

I plan to start again. At least for the month of August. It’s easy to commit to something for thirty days, and I know that life happens sometimes, so I don’t want to commit further that I know I can keep. I’m looking forward to getting into it again, and I look forward to having a platform for my thoughts to come out again…frankly, not for your benefit, but for my own.

For the random few that actually do care about my thoughts, glad to have your readership again. Hope you enjoy my jabbering.