Hi, and welcome to my first blog post.
It will be short, but I’ve been thinking about it for over eighteen months now. Mainly because it took me that long to admit to myself that I wanted to do this in the first place.
Write, I mean. Not write this blog post. Although now that I think about it, the two things are inextricably connected.
You see, it started with my first blog, www.kissmycurls.com, a natural hair website my sister and I started because we were both out of a job. I wrote, she designed, I tweeted, and suddenly our blog was a raging monster that demanded more time and money that either one of us could muster. I broke out a few times. My sister literally lost chunks of hair. We were turning into two ugly, stressed out successes, attempting to manage the blog that was supposed to be a hobby that turned into a job that somehow was costing us more money than we naively believed it should make us. We decided we had to go bigger. Drive farther. Talk to more people. Push for more recognition. Maybe that would make it easier. Maybe then it would be worth it.
It wasn’t, due in large part to our lack of preparedness and the interference of our well meaning yet blogosphere illiterate friends. We crashed and burned out and I ran away for writing for years after that.
Well, writing for the public. I still filled journal after journal with ramblings, mainly about boys, mainly about one particular boy, because after that I placed the source of my happiness into the health of my relationships (which was a BUST because I am not good with people). My deep unhappiness was his fault, was my sister’s fault, was my dad’s fault, it was the fact that I was broke’s fault, blah blah blah, until one day in a fit of rage I registered for graduate school and moved to Chicago. Angrily. And over several months. And in several different apartments. Apparently when I am unhappy I move a lot.
Since childhood I’ve always been the type of person that couldn’t do things long term that my heart was not into, no matter how much I wanted to. If I had any willpower whatsoever I would have been a trilingual concert pianist with a six pack by the time I was twenty. Instead I speak one and a half languages, have a comfy, round belly, and can only play the first five seconds of Chopsticks. I think. My grad school career was about as successful as my pianist one, as in it was painful and didn’t last long. Fear had me fighting with myself for eighteen months, much of that time spent staring at the homepage of my first blog, wondering why I felt a gentle pull to repeat what I felt was a total catastrophe.
Then there was a shift. I really can’t say the date it happened, exactly, only that it was in the last twelve months of my eighteen month journey to this blog post. I was sitting on my loveseat in my tiny, loveable apartment (I’m practicing using positive adjectives when describing things pertaining to myself….I can’t tell if it’s helping) buried in paperwork for an internship that I absolutely loathed and was killing myself to get to (I don’t believe this to be a superlative, but then again, I am quite dramatic) when I decided that anything, ANYTHING, was better than this bullshit. I started crying into my hands because I was suddenly scared. Then I called my sister. She said, “If something isn’t working, try something else” and ten months later I turned around while on my way to class and never looked back.
And now here I am, on the same loveseat, writing my first blog post.
I am not sure where it will go.
Maybe nowhere.
Maybe it will win an award.
Maybe it will go into a book that becomes a bestseller and my name will be all over the planet.
Maybe it will just make you giggle. Or snort. Or think.
Whatever. If it becomes nothing else, it’s a step in the right direction.
2 Comments
Congrats on launching your blog! You’re in for quite a ride! 🙂
Thank you!