I just took a mulligan.
I’d been working on a blog post for over 3 weeks. I’ve had the darned tab open in my browser for 3 weeks. It just sits there. Sometimes it calls out to me. “Hey… finish me.” “Helllooooo…” But I ignored those calls. I kept wanting to use the fact my family and I were on vacation in Savannah and Orlando as an excuse for not completing it. But how would that make any sense? I had plenty of time. In fact, the trip was basically for us to relax and laze around. And if that doesn’t scream I had the time, I don’t know what does.
I wanted to capture my experience chaperoning my daughter’s class trip to the Museum of Natural History. But it was taking forever. And tonight, because I’m committed to keeping to a cadence releasing blog posts – which I’ve now missed my deadline by a week – I pledged to finish it.
But it was painful. I felt like I was pulling teeth. The words weren’t flowing. I don’t suppose everyone likes everything I write all the time but sometimes my wife, who is my favorite reader, will tell me it feels like I’m “trying too hard.” But I didn’t need her to tell me that tonight, I knew it.
And the other day, I had lunch with a great friend of mine who challenged me that what he was reading from me lately was missing something. Missing my essence. I appreciated his opinion, although the recent post I wrote about my daughter and her dressing to the beat of her own drum, Dapper Dandy, was probably my favorite post I ever wrote. He’s entitled. And perhaps he’s right.
He’s an aspiring writer, and a future blogger, and we had a very interesting conversation about what we should or shouldn’t post, which is really a conversation about what we feel comfortable about publishing. We talked about what ramifications might come about should we publish whatever we wanted if there were absolutely no repercussions.
But as we sat in his car, sheltered from an absolute deluge and stuffed from a wonderful lunch at Trufa Restaurant in my neighborhood, we arrived at this: Baring your soul is frightening, especially when you think it might impact your path, whether it be professional or personal, but perhaps that’s what’s meant to happen and the current path you’re on, the one you’re trying to protect, isn’t the right one. Whoa.
And publish. World… it’s on.
World... it's on! 