Count Me In

I confess.

I am not as good at blogging as I would have hoped.

Maybe it takes a while to get into a groove. Maybe it takes a while for the pressure of the posting process to wear off.

But I am still in the awkward beginning phases of this relationship. I mean, I really, truly enjoy it. I look forward to it. I think more often than ever before about writing; I actually think that the way I see the world has shifted a bit.

I swear, I have interesting thoughts all day long. Thoughts that I think you, my loyal readers, would be intrigued, enlightened, fascinated and entertained by. I come up with funny or insightful titles to things I would like to write about. At my desk at work, I often find myself literally lost in thoughts, questions, stories, musings, which I would like to commit to writing. Writing has a way of making me stop and appreciate things through language on an even deeper level. It frees me to come up with words to relish in the simple things that happen each day which make life worth celebrating and being thankful for. Except for the fact that when I sit down to post on this here site, a self monitor that I am not very familiar with comes out and I am hesitant to post.

I am reading a book right now for my Narrative Therapy class by Harlene Anderson called Conversation, Language, and Possibilities. I love this book, I love her perspective on human relationship and understanding, and I hope to be the kind of therapist that she is someday. So the book is all about how we construct meaning in our lives primarily through conversation (parts of it remind me a bit of something we may have read in Rhetoric, but with a significant amount more emphasis on the therapeutic process). We live storied lives with one another and find meaning, worth, healing, love, anger and everything in between through language and conversation. We gain understanding as we enter into conversation about things, whether those words are used to create an inner monologue or a dialogue with a trusted friend, spouse, therapist, or stranger on the street.

She makes a distinction between being transparent and being public in what we choose to reveal and share of ourselves- of our wonderings and fears, thoughts, speculations, opinions, everything. She says "I choose to use the word public rather than transparent...because I do not think that another person can see through us or we through him or her. Rather, we can only see what we choose to show the other." And this I think is so true. We choose what we share, and we present to others what we want them to see of us. Sometimes this comes so natural we don't even think twice about sharing pieces of ourselves. Other times it feels like such a vulnerable nakedness.

So, I self monitor when I blog.

I get nervous. I become self-conscious because things seem so permanent when they are in writing and I begin to feel incredibly uninteresting- or at least incapable of letting the interesting and insightful and funny out eloquently, which is maybe worse.

But you know what they say about practice. So I'm working on it.