Day 47: Not just the fun but the self-doubt

Yesterday I blamed my diminished desire to write on what really was an unusually high level of human interaction for a little old hermit like me, even though it was like 3 phone calls, a quick shopping trip and a handful of online chats. That is a lot of humanity for me for one day, but I might have stretched the truth just a tad.

One person I talked to yesterday is a friend who is not familiar with blogs. In the course of catching up, I mentioned as something going on with me that I have managed to hit that Publish button 45 days in a row. Because you know what? It’s probably the biggest external accomplishment I’ve got to show for the past month and a half.

And it’s taken a lot more energy than I thought it would. Even when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about it. What to write about, how to get everything out when there is so much swirling around in my head, and mostly how to write what I want without possibly offending anyone. At all. Ever.

That’s the biggie. Blame my Mercury in Libra, I do not want to piss people off by saying something offensive. But I’ve got some opinions! Even though some of them might not be popular, I might have to get them out onto the page/screen at some point if for no other reason than to get them out of my head. We’ll see.

So this friend (is it wrong that right now I kind of want to demote him to acquaintance?), being unfamiliar with blogs, or with the idea that a blog can be a useful thing, even if only for the personal enjoyment or evolution of the writer, was completely incredulous that I would consider a) putting anything about my life online in a blog format and b) having done so for 45 days straight an accomplishment.

I think his response was something to the tune of Why in the hell would anyone do something like that? There may have also been a variation of Who the hell would want to read that? in there. It’s all a blur.

Why indeed? Despite a consoling conversation with my blogging hero and roomie-of-the-soul about how you write for yourself and that’s what matters most, I didn’t really have a good reason for doing this daily blogging thing besides I wanted to see if I could. Not to diminish that reason, because I think it’s a good one. I just wished at the time that I had something more convincing to offer by way of explanation.

His reaction just took the wind out of my sails a little bit, and then I was just questioning whether anything I could think to write about was Good Enough. I’m more prone to sail-winding than I would like. I might have more to say on that topic in the future if I can quell my Don’t-Offend-People panic. So perhaps a mild crisis of confidence was going on as well yesterday. I can’t be entirely sure. I just wanted to own up about it.

Today I’ve been being domestic (laundry, cleaning) and stealing time to finish Julie & Julia. I don’t know who told me it wasn’t all that good, but I wish I could remember because I want to tell her (it had to be a her) that I think this book is delightful. I love the author’s voice, the hilarious way she spins a story, the sheer moxy to set such a goal for herself. I mean, come on, I set myself the measly goal of posting something, anything every day for a month. Nothing so grand as cooking 500+ recipes in a year and eating things like brains and livers and kidneys and aspic.

I’ve heard the movie is better than the book, but I’m going to reserve judgment on that until I see it for myself, because I might have heard it from the same person-with-different-taste-than-me who told me the book was just eh. I can’t see how the movie could possibly be better than the book. And to think, it all started because of her blog that she was just doing for herself. Hmm…