So I started writing a blog post for this week about a month ago. I came back to it a few times and edited it, but it was never quite feeling right. I talked through it with my husband to no avail and last night I realized what the problem was. The post was too much of a rant, me complaining about the world and my own opinion of how things ‘should be’. And when I stopped to think about it, I remembered that that’s just not my style. The whole reason I have such a problem with writing blog posts in the first place is because I don’t feel comfortable stating my opinions as ‘right’.
And I’ve struggled a bit with the idea that I’m only careful with putting my opinions out there because I’m a woman and yada yada. But that’s the same trap I found myself falling into for those years when I thought I wasn’t female enough. I was listening to people ‘out there’ tell me how I should react to the world around me. I thought because I don’t like jewelry, or bags, or makeup that I wasn’t female enough. It actually got worse with the “me too” movement because suddenly there were more opinions out there about what women should do or be like. At a certain point, I finally had to decide: ‘screw that’.
I think I’m finally making that same kind of distinction here. I write my journal entries that are basically just that, journal entries, because I want people to be able to read about the struggles I have in my every day life, see how I deal with them, and perhaps find something that will help them in their own lives. Giving my opinion on how people should deal with their feelings (that’s what the failed blog post was about) was outside of that. I don’t want to tell people how they can have a better relationship with their own feelings. I’d rather show them my own relationship with myself and my feelings and let people draw their on conclusions.
And finding that this is part of who I am has been a lot of trial and error in learning to distinguish between when something is hard vs when something feels wrong. I could never begin to tell anyone else how to differentiate that for themselves. The closest I’ve come is a set of posts I wrote a while ago that talk about feel and awareness.
Post #1: The Skill of Feel
Post #2: Developing Awareness
Post #3: Analyzing My Awareness
Though even in these posts I focus mostly on the process I used with a few suggestions of how it could work for someone else. These are the types of posts I like to write, I guess I just needed the reminder. Now I just need to wait until the next thing goes wrong in my life so I can talk about how I respond to it. Shouldn’t be too long.
