Eliminating the Fear

The blog that I poured my heart and soul into is on a bit of a hiatus as of now. I used to blog pretty regularly. It first started out as a way to just get things off my mind, to clear my head, but as I progressed through my year of growth it quickly became a way to keep my positive mentality alive - a way to take a story, see the lesson inside it, and share it with others. I was on my journey, sharing my life with others, and hopefully bringing some insight to their own. But once I had reached my "big destination" for the year (my new fabulous job), I noticed that the quality of my posts began to decrease. I was blogging just to blog. I wasn't angry anymore, I wasn't in unhappy relationships anymore (for the most part), and I wasn't leading a life of negativity anymore. In fact... I was BEAMING from head-to-toe, but I simply felt like I had nothing to write about anymore.

There was also this thing called: I felt like I had to filter myself for I KNEW who was reading my blog posts. I wanted to dig deeper in my journey, but I was feeling like I had to watch what I said and filter myself. (Ugh...that makes me disappointed in myself.) BUT I kept at it, I tried to block those thoughts, hoping that I was just in a "phase." But empty post after empty post led me to feel like blogging was pointless.

In a last effort, I wrote a post about love. I was going through some stuff in my personal life and I wanted to write about it. It started strong but in the end, it turned out to be short and somewhat "unfinished." And by unfinished, I mean I didn't allow myself to really lay it all out there because I couldn't get past the fear of what others were going to think. After much hesitation, I hit publish anyway. And boy oh boy did that not work so well for me. Shortly after I whore'd out the link (Twitter, Facebook, blah blah), I got a text - a disapproving text - of what I wrote. And you know what I did? I unpublished it without hesitation.

The next day, I closed the chapter on my blog for a while. I couldn't get past these ridiculous mental barriers and I had had enough. I wasn't getting anything out of my own blog anymore and I realized I wasn't blogging FOR me. So, I said farewell (for now) and I honestly haven't thought much about it until I got today's Reverb10 topic:

December 2 Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

After reading this, I realized I haven't done much writing, if any at all. This blog... this "Keep Moving Forward" project is the first time I've written since I said goodbye to The Unconventional Geek over a month ago. I have to say, it feels good to write again.

At this point, I do a lot of things that don't contribute to my writing - getting caught up on my DVR, Facebook/Twitter, gym time, hanging out with friends, etc...but it hasn't really mattered because I haven't been writing in general. Of course I can eliminate these things or at least decrease the amount of time spent on them but what I need to eliminate first is allowing the fear of what other people think about my writing get in the way of actually writing.