Today is going to be a bit of a "meta" post...a post about the blog itself. Specifically, the posting schedule. When I was on my bike trip - which is how this blog got started - I posted almost every day. That made sense; it was kind of my personal travelogue, or diary. I wanted to remember what was going on. Plus, there was something interesting happening almost every day. For a while after I got back, I didn't post very often because I was just kind of exhausted and adrift. Then I got back into posting every day, then I dropped it, and back and forth.
Recently, I made a personal commitment to post every day. Part of the reason for this is some conversations that I had with my therapist. I've always had a bit of a "death of a salesman" complex. That is, I feel - rightly or no - that I don't get as much attention as I'd like to. It's a fundamentally selfish and almost certainly unhelpful attitude, that I'd like to lose, but it's there nonetheless. And, quite frankly, posting to the blog helps. It helps, of course, to think that people are reading what I wrote, and responding. And so I thank every one of you who takes the time to read, and especially those that read and then respond, either here or on Facebook. You are part of my conversation and my healing process and I value you more than you know. But in a strange way, merely writing things down makes me feel heard. It makes me feel like, at the very least, *I'm* listening to myself. And of course I'm my own best listener. I kind of think everyone should have a blog, even if that blog is only for yourself (I guess that's what they call a diary). Although I'm pretty open and exposed on this blog, I have written a few entries that, after writing them, I threw away (or kept without publishing). But even those entries felt cathartic and important. I do go back and read what I've written some times, but even if I never did, these entries feel important to me. Maybe it's just a way of fooling my psyche into thinking that someone cares. Maybe it's that part of me feels like taking the time to actual put my thoughts down on paper gives them legitimacy, makes it feel like they matter. Maybe part of it is that age-old exercise of talking to yourself to work out problems. One of my old programmer jobs used to have this piñata, that you could talk to, when you had a programming problem to work out. It sounds silly, but in the act of explaining the problem to the piñata, oftentimes you would realize the solution. It just had to be spoken out loud.
So, yeah. I am going to endeavour to make every single post on this blog interesting and worth reading. But even on those days when I don't feel like I have much to say, I'm going to take my best idea and run with it anyway. Because it's a practice, like meditation or eating right, that I have to do every day to make it the most effective.
So, today, I'm talking about the blog. And, about my failure to sometimes witness myself, and to let others witness me. I feel constantly unheard, but of course it's not true. My parents hear me, my job hears me, my friends hear me. And the more I let them hear me, the more they hear me. It's true that, in some ways, I had a difficult childhood in this respect. My brother took a lot of the attention in my family. My parents - bless their hearts - never knew what to do with me. I should have had tons of friends but instead I hid in computers for way too long. I got shy in high school, and retreated. And I developed an overdeveloped sense that I was being ignored. Which, of course, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And now I live in San Francisco, honestly (and I say this with love) one of the most self-absorbed cities in the world, so that isn't helping.
But part of the solution is recognizing that I am my own best friend, and my own witness. That I don't need to be validated by others, but to serve that purpose for myself. I'm the only person I can count on 100% of the time. And if I don't see myself as valuable, others never will. This blog is just one instrument of that, one way to show myself that I'm worth paying attention to.