How do you like the new clothes?
Fresh from me deciding to change the blog name, and the URL, for the umpteenth time, Vincent unveiled a whole lot of new themes for the Scribbles blogging platform. This has meant I had to fiddle and play with them to try to decide what fitted me best out of the nine new options.
I've gone with an option that has a notebook feel, with little handwriting style underline flourishes and animations. Hope you like it.
It of course may change. Such is life with a constantly changing indecisive brain. Speaking of which...
I've been a bit quiet recently. I regularly have these periods of struggle mentally, where I am basically overthinking absolutely everything and a little bit trapped in my own head.
My health hasn't helped really. I'm not as active as usual, struggling with my daily walks, and I tire really easily.
Then I stew away, brain ticking over with thinking, but not with a lot of energy left to actually do anything.
This time, as with many other times before, it was me writing blogs that occupied my stewing and indecisive brain. This was probably good timing for some new themes to procrastinate over and let me mess about with how the blog looks rather than write. I can make it look like there was something new as a proxy for 'doing something', and not actually spend too much time thinking in order to decide on what to write.
During these episodes I generally start getting a bit paranoid about how much I am sharing, and whether it is necessary, or appropriate, to have certain things appearing here in the way that they are. When I'm in the depths it starts feeling unnecessary to share anything at all, and total blog deletion is on the menu.
Or I worry about if the inconsequential and purely fun things I've already posted are actually funny or just offensive, or too obtuse, or if I'm coming over too self-absorbed... or too shallow... or many, many, other things.
And then, hopefully (it's always happened so far anyway), I eventually get to a stage where some writing starts to flow out instead of being held back, dammed and gently swirling about in a reservoir of indecision, waiting for a break in the mental wall to let it out somehow.
If I'm lucky, the blog still exists for me to start on. If I'm not, I have to start the cycle all over again.
This time it was my wife who removed the brick from the dam wall and broke me out of it. She needed me to edit her draft blog post and position some photos in it, to get it ready for publishing. As I was doing that I read what she had written about me helping her in her creative pursuits with some apparently wise words.
Never second guess what people will want, make what you want to make, and people will love it. I do just that and the response is overwhelming.
And lo, the blockage was lifted.
I have been doing similar with my writing. Second-guessing if what I write is entertaining enough, is what I want people to think of me, is too boring, is it even necessary?
And really, I need to just get over myself and just write. Just write whatever I feel like writing. Silly, sensible, or sarcastic nonsense. Readers decide what they think. Readers who like it will like it, people who don't won't come again. I won't know either way and I have to stop thinking of what it reveals about me, and whether it's too much or not, because people don't care as much as my brain is telling me they do anyway. They're already wrapped up in what others are thinking of them!
'Get over yourself' is the bit of mental kicking I need. Just write.
