getting started and using honesty as a superpower
The family holiday. It seemed like I had every reason to be happy, but I wasn't. There was guilt, and I knew why I didn't feel happy. I couldn't share it with my family because I worried it would ruin things for them.
I still needed to express myself, but I couldn't bring the people close to me down. Ever since that moment, I've been thinking about how this blog is going to work, who it's going to serve, how it's going to help me grow to become a better person. I want to have a net positive impact on the world around me.
So I've been spending a lot of time polishing up the website, thinking about how it's going to function and how it's going to impress on the people that come across it. I've been doing all of the gratifying parts, like designing my theme, but avoiding getting down to the nitty-gritty, doing the hard parts, which is actually writing the blog.
That changes now.
As I've started to come to terms with my life situation, I've been creating a database of notes. They just have titles, and there's about 300 or so up to now. They cover everything you can think of, from traumatic events in my past to companies I've worked at, insights I've had during meditation. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
The plan really was to start working through those and using voice dictation to articulate how said events and situations have affected me. I planned to reflect on them, hopefully gaining a little bit more clarity on how I've ended up where I am today.
I told myself that once I've done all that deep reflective work, I would use it to create the blog posts, but I still found myself putting it off. So I think the best thing I can do to get into a publishing cadence is just to share a bit of the resistance on getting started and document the process.
This is my starting point, and I'm hoping that I can just be open and honest with this process as much as possible. If I try to make some sort of commitment to publishing at least one blog post a week, it creates accountability.
I've given writing a go in the past, and I've done alright on platforms like Medium and Substack, but at the end of the day, it was all just to feed my ego and give me some kind of external gratification. Now, I feel like it's coming from a different place, and I'm using my writing to be honest about how painful life can be.
It's amazing how difficult being honest can be, even through an anonymous blog.
Honesty is the starting point, and I'm finding that the more I practice it in my writing, the more I'm finding the courage to be honest about my struggles with the people around me.
It's the beginning of uncovering the darker sides of the human experience so they can be transcended. Being honest is one of the simplest things we can do, but it's also one of the most difficult. But once you can practice it radically (I'm still practicing) it can become a superpower. I hope doing so here will give others the courage to do the same.