I can't get started with you

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A few weeks ago, my friend Laura left a comment on my Facebook page asking, "Whatever happened to that blog you used to write? The one with the typewriter?"

And I sighed. I gave up on it, I wanted to tell her. Writing about my daily life seemed so trivial, self-involved and about a thousand other synonyms so I stopped.

But, I thought, maybe if someone I've never met in real life, only share a connection with through music and is halfway around the world from me likes what I write about...maybe I should do it again.

So here I am. To write about myself. And I don't understand why I make this so hard because it isn't hard at all. I've been blogging for more than 12 years, on and off, and it use to be my release to sit down at the end of the day, compose my thoughts or share a story and then head off to bed.

I miss that.

And for god's sake, this is what I do for a living - I write. Why can't I do it for myself?

So in an effort to jump start my writing, here's a list of the top three reasons why I make blogging too difficult. Maybe if I write it down, I'll get over it all:

I worry too much about the impact my words will have.
And they do have an impact. I've posted a link to this little space on Twitter and Facebook a few times...so I'm not really sure what eyes might wander across the page anymore. I don't write any scathing entries. That's not my style...but I've been at the communication game long enough to know what I write and what a reader perceives doesn't always match up. People don't take you at your word, they read whatever they want into a sentence...and then tend to want to talk to you about what that meant at the worst possible times. So I'll say this now: I don't play the smoke and mirrors game. What you read is what you get. Period. End of sentence.

I made it become a challenge more than a release.
Instead of just sitting down and typing whatever, I felt an obligation to write something of importance. Something meaningful. But blogs, especially personal blogs, aren't really for that kind of writing all the time, are they? This has been a challenge with my music blog as well...one that I am slowly overcoming. I think sometimes I'm a little too old school journalism to write "nothing" entries and think they suffice.

I felt like what I have to say didn't matter.
Does the Internet really need another blog written by a stereotypical suburban girl about her typical life? Eh. I've never written blogs for the sole purpose of attracting an audience, but I've also tricked myself into the "Why would you bother writing about that? No one cares what you think" mindset one too many times. At some point there needs to be a happy medium. That begins here, today.