How to blog (I really haven’t the foggiest)

To really learn how to blog in a way that will change other people’s lives, I turn to lots of actual experts, including Havi Brooks and her blogging therapy series.  (Start here).  What I’m learning, as I dip my toes into the blogosphere myself, is how to change my own life.  

Or maybe it’s not so much a matter of “how to.”  I think I’m discovering that through the actual doing of the blogging, changing my own life happens necessarily.  What with having to deal with the fear of what other people might think of me, what I might think of me, and then whether I have anything to say at all.  Just for starters.

Yesterday morning on Twitter, @pleasefindthis said something that really resonated with me.  Yes, I am quoting a tweet, and allowing that this is what teachers sometimes look like in 2009.  

(And say what you want about the downfalls of online communication, but I am just really blown away that I get to benefit from the wisdom of someone I otherwise may never meet.  And not just from your garden variety famous, nobel prize winning someones, but from actual everyday people.)  

So the tweet: “Blogging: proof that you really wanted someone to read your diary all along.”

Yeah.  I think it struck me because this is exactly what I’m surprised to be realizing.  

There is nothing more satisfying than finding the words to express myself authentically, and in a way that actually helps me better understand my own self.  

And the idea here is to take it a step further and share those true words with other living, breathing people.  When it comes to wanting people to read our diaries, it’s the same thing we’re trying to do in all of our relationships, with every interaction, all the time, right?  Trying to connect, to “relate,” to forge a relationship based on trust and intimacy.

After all, I really want to be seen and heard for who I am.  Except when I really don’t.  Because there’s that other thing I want, and that’s to be loved for who I am, and that intersection is where it gets interesting.  

Writing a blog is forcing helping me to realize that there may have been one or two instances, in ancient history, when I chose to be loved over being myself.  It’s a fact of life that sometimes the two are mutually exclusive.  Except not really, because then it wouldn’t be love at all.  You know?

So I thought I was afraid to blog because (among other things) I was afraid of people seeing the real me.  But that runs totally contrary to the realization that I want people to read my diary.  

I’m finding that there are two very different kinds of fear that come up for me: (1) paralyzing fear; and (2) fear that is just as terrifying, but also feels like a risk worth taking.  And the paralyzing fear actually has more to do with somehow misrepresenting what I’m about, or giving people the wrong impression of me, than it does with being myself.  Again, total opposite of what I expected, which for me equals major transformative revelation.

With all of these swirly layered nuggets (!!!), this is part one in a two part series.  So I’ll finish the thought next time.  Until the time after that, when the very nature of blogging reveals more aha’s than I ever expected.