For the love of Blog

Time goes by, the coffee gets cold, the weather changes, and before I know it... I've forgotten about my blog. The other day, I was at a friend's Labor Day barbecue when someone actually asked me about my blog in conversation. Wait, what? You know about my blog?! I thought. It was a first for me. And yet, it sadly came as a surprise that, yes, people are reading this sentence right now. It's on the internet after all! I responded by saying, "Oh yeah, I kind of blog... only about once a week, though." And my husband immediately popped up and said, "Once a week! That's still a big deal!" And he's right.

In my heart, I have high hopes. I know I want to write for a living. I know I want to wake up every day and do something I am passionate about. I know I don't want to write memos and copy letters for some boring company, if I could even get into writing. And I don't want to settle for something other than my dreams. My dream is to write, but yet here is my writing, for all to see, like it's a reality... And maybe if I just worked on that dream, it would start to feel like reality to me instead of like a failed high school science experiment, exploding in my face every time it doesn't feel perfect.

There are so many other successful bloggers out there. I have bookmarked nearly 50 blogs recently, with the intent of studying their posts, their content, their layout and design, all in order to get ideas for my blog, and to see how they became successful. But in the midst of this looking and yearning to learn, I become discouraged like the perfectionist I am. How can I ever get there? Having that kind of blog is sooo far away for me right now. Or is it?

For the love of my blog, I hope to actually make Freeing Imperfections a home for my writing. This isn't just a home for nothing, a space taken up for my entertainment. It's my blog. Anyone with a successful blog certainly loves their blog, right? So why am I not loving mine?

Well, here's a few reasons...

- I over-think my audience. Too often I think, does someone really want to read that?

- I under-post. This is directly correlated with over-thinking my audience. I convince myself no one will want to read it, so I don't even attempt to write anything at all, leaving me with one blog post a week - not truly enough to drive traffic.

- I'm afraid. I'm afraid of revealing too much of myself on the internet. I'm afraid of making a wrong step. It's a scary world out there.

- I've drastically reduced the time I spend on the internet recently. Too often, I find my time being wasted on Facebook and Pinterest. While I am still pretty addicted to Pinterest when I allow myself to be on it, I am slowly gravitating away from the computer to use my time better. But the only way to blog is at the computer!

Overall, I just want to say that I do love my blog. This is my place to write, to feel free, to be creative, to find meaning... And now's the time to own up to doing what I love most: writing! Here's to more blog posts and a better attitude about blogging in general!

Fellow bloggers, can you relate to any of this? What is keeping you from blogging the way you want or having the blog you want?