Uh Oh, Fear

I feel it settling into my stomach.  It’s a very familiar churning.  I’ve not had breakfast yet, so it could be that.  But I also feel the little beginning of a pounding in my chest – the beginning of what might be a panic attack, if I still had those (I don’t, thanks to an old program that I went through called Attacking Anxiety and Depression).  I feel an absolute discomfort and I know where it’s coming from.  I’ve written many blog entries over the last couple of weeks and what I was hoping would happen is happening but it’s making me uncomfortable.

I try to be an honest writer.  I have always written the same way that I talk, which is why you will often notice me starting sentences with “and,” “but,” “so,” things I know, from English classes, that I shouldn’t do.  But I try to write as if the person I’m talking to is right in front of me.  I don’t write formally because I don’t speak formally or think formally.

Because I write as if I’m speaking, what happens is that the real me always comes out.  As these posts are being created – some of which have been published and some of which are sitting waiting to be published – I’m starting to get a very clear picture of who I am, my positives and my negatives.  I’ve been examining myself for decades so none of this is new to me; I’ve just not been doing it publicly.  Each entry is a little mirror.  It’s scary.

I want to be honest but I also want to be a good person.  I don’t like my flaws.  I overemphasize them, as do many LSersD (long-time sufferers of depression).  I underestimate the good about myself; I’m sure we all do that.  I realize that by being honest, I might sometimes alienate people from my blog.  I realize that by being honest, I might sometimes have opinions that aren’t popular.  I could carefully edit to try and block out the negatives but the things that are negatives to some people are positives to others and vice versa.  And so I’m feeling the familiar churn of fear in my belly, in my gut, because my blog is absolutely a presentation of my SELF to the world.

So why put myself through it?

Because all in all, I feel like I’m an average person – that’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing – and I do believe that all of my positives, all of my negatives, by putting them out there, they just might help someone.  So I’m going to go ahead and suffer through it and try to be authentic, try to be honest, try to help people where I can, and try to face up to the reality that there’s a lot of responsibility in having a blog.

Peace

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