Blog Evolution

There's nothing like a commitment to daily blogging to reveal that most of the time I desire to say nothing. Or that I feel like anything I have in me to say is either too grumpy, too boring, or too depressing to put into print.

There's a columnist that writes for our local newspaper who, it is evident to me, struggles with this same thing. And yet, because she is paid to fill a space each Sunday, she picks some minute detail of her week that can be publicly consumed and writes several hundred words about it. I read it every week I get my hands on the paper, just sorta to see if she's pulled it off.

I started this blog eight years ago, before there was Facebook (for me, at least). I had small children, and I really needed to sit up late at night sometimes and work out thoughts that didn't involve Barney, nursing, or race cars.

It was stiff and clunky at first. My first major direction was unschooling. I was learning how to let go of being a control freak parent who felt the need to micromanage. Then I started to be involved in Communion and Liberation, and I wrote a lot about that as I struggled to learn the complex intellectual language of Giussani. And in the middle of that, unbeknownst to me, I began chronicling a spiritual path that led me to where I am now, having entered formation as a Secular Carmelite. I've learned along the way, both by life and by writing, to find my own voice and my own silence.

This blog has been a place of solace for me, and also an experience of extreme vulnerability, especially when I developed regular readers that I wasn't expecting.

I have been told that I should write on spirituality, to help other people understand how God calls to them and work in their lives. It didn't really dawn on me in those moments to mention that I do actually do that. I know that writing is a form of prayer for me, and there are times when I go back and read things I've written myself and find God speaking to me something I'd forgotten or lost sight of. I also know that very few people actually read my blog. And that's ok. Really, sometimes it frustrates me that my brilliance is not noticed, but then I get over it. And sometimes I go back after a year or two and read what I thought was brilliant and realize it is so dense that no one could hardly follow my thought through to the end.

But writing is for me. And if I don't hit "publish," the vulnerability aspect of it is diminished, and then it isn't writing in the same way.

I just wish I had had the internet and a blog when I was a teen and a 20something. I think my life would have been much, much better.