Starting a blog has been a really great learning experience for me in a lot of ways. I enjoy the time I spend on it and love the process of picking photos, writing, editing, and coming up with poems for my posts. I love playing around with the formatting and getting it to look just right. The result is that I spend WAY more time on each post than I really need to, and then don’t post about a topic I care about because I don’t have the time to make it perfect.
I want to just start sharing the things that are important to me, the things that are getting me fired up and making me feel passionate about life.
One thing that comes to mind here is the idea of perfection. I want all of my posts to be perfect. They’re public, anybody can read them and I want them to be just right. The thing is that if they never come to actually be because I’m waiting until it’s perfect, it doesn’t help anybody. The truth is that they are never going to be just perfect anyway, and that whole idea of striving towards that is based on some assumption that ‘perfect’ is the same to everybody else. I can’t please everybody with my writing and may not ever even have a popular site. That is what some part of me wants to strive for, even though it’s not my real goal with this.
There is a lot of fear involved with it as well for me. Fear is a topic that seems to be coming up in my life a lot lately, and I’ve started becoming super aware of it. It’s an area where I think I’ve been growing a lot lately. Where I used to just avoid things that made me feel anxious or afraid, I am making a conscious effort to face these things and overcome my fears. I am trying to do things that make me afraid so that I can expand my comfort zone and grow through them. Thinking about this has made me realize just how much anxiety and fear play a part in my thoughts.
I’m afraid people won’t like my writing. I’m afraid nobody will want to read it. I’m afraid it won’t be good enough. I’m afraid it won’t be perfect. I’m afraid that the things that I have to share aren’t compelling enough. I’m afraid that I won’t get traffic because I don’t want to spend my time caring about SEO topics (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the topic of all of the little things one can do with a website to increase it’s ranking with search engines, or in simpler terms to make it show up in the search results on Google to drive more visitors to the site).
I want to overcome the fear of perfection. When I started this site, I knew it wasn’t like it was going to appeal to every person on the planet, and I figured that if I let my personality shine through my writing that the people that would like it would be attracted to it and I shouldn’t waste my time trying to please the other people anyway. I want to open up more and put myself, my thoughts, my writing, my soul out there… imperfections included and editing limited.
I want to challenge myself. I thrive with challenges. I expect that limiting time will increase my creativity and productivity. Sometimes limitations actually force us to grow and create things that we wouldn’t otherwise achieve.
I want to not put off writing at all because I “don’t have enough time”. And instead to leverage a small amount of time. It’s not unreasonable to think that I could fit in 15 minutes a day. Granted, I don’t plan to post every day just for the sake of posting if I don’t feel that I have something to say.
I do hope to continue with some of the themes here: figuring out what my goals and approach to blogging are, examine and work through things I’m afraid of, think about ways to be more productive and to be creative with my time, letting go of perfection, and letting go of worrying so much about what other people think and doing the things I want to be doing instead.
So, this is the first of my 15-minute posts, but I hope to write more of them, to open up and have the courage to be vulnerable and present a less-polished version of my work. Anyway, the timer has gone off, so this post is done.
3 Responses
Fifteen minutes posts are a really great idea! I set a schedule for myself, posting every Monday and Thursday, but I’ve found that it feels restrictive. I’ve stopped posting on other days, even when I have something I want to write about, because I think I’ll save what I was thinking about for my next posting day and then I never do. And sometimes on those days, it takes me much longer than it should to write — I like the idea of setting a timer and giving myself fifteen minutes. And I love the idea of limitations making us grow.
I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately, too. Fear and anxiety. I am (I hope) buying my RV this morning and I’ve been so stressed about it. For no reason, except (as I realized last night) pride. I’m scared of making a mistake, I’m scared of over-paying, I’m scared of being taken advantage of, and all of that just boils down to pride. So I’m trying to let go of that this morning as I move forward! And good luck with your own moving forward — I’ll keep reading!
Hi Sarah!
If you try out the 15 minute thing, let me know how it goes. Have you thought about writing about whatever you want to when you’re inspired and just waiting to post it until your posting day? I’ve wondered a bit about the pros and cons of posting on a schedule verses when I feel like it.
Saw the picture of your new RV on your site and it looks gorgeous!! You must be so excited. I hope to see pics of the inside once you get to pick it up.
The schedule, for me, is a reminder to post. I’ve had periods where I didn’t post for weeks just because I never really thought about it and a) that’s no way to build a following of any sort and b) I’ve gotten emails from people who have gotten worried and that’s no good, either. I’ve also got a little pile of posts in my draft folder that I’ve never posted because I held on to them thinking I’d post on the next scheduled day and then I had something else to write about that day and then they started to feel out-of-date… you know how it goes! So far the schedule thing is working out pretty well for me. But the next day I’m stuck, I’m definitely setting a timer and seeing where it takes me! And when I get my camper — next Wednesday — it’ll be conveniently timed for a Thursday morning blog post about the interior — thanks for the idea!